


Dig Two Graves

by John_f_drake



Category: Original Work
Genre: F/F, F/M, Multi, Rape, Violence, plot heavy, revenge" />
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-13
Updated: 2020-03-13
Packaged: 2021-03-01 00:34:24
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 8
Words: 37,773
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23126356
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/John_f_drake/pseuds/John_f_drake
Summary: In a world where elves have been reduced to a race of sexual slaves for more than a thousand years, one elf plots vengeance for all who came before.
Comments: 3
Kudos: 4





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This story was written with EvilFuzzy and Alyssarhea

“Before you embark on a journey of revenge, first dig two graves.”

-Confucius, Ancient Chinese Proverb

Syllia had made only one mistake in her whole long campaign of vengeance. She had taken only real misstep in all of about three hundred years of planning, laboring, running, fighting, and killing. The righteous justice she strove to inflict upon her people’s oppressors could not be stopped by anything in heaven or earth, except for that one miscalculation, that one moment of doubt and hesitation.

Her only mistake hadn’t been to kill someone. It had been to spare someone.

She should have killed him when she had the chance. She should have hardened her heart and done the deed that night, when she had already stained her hands so red with the blood of her hated masters. She should have been colder, she should have been sterner, she should have been crueler and more ruthless… But even hate had its limits, and even the bitterest and coldest heart could still be moved by pity in a moment of weakness. She had stayed her hand when she saw the child, and she had spared him. She knew not why, even to this day. Had it been a sense of justice, perhaps? Some shadow of kindheartedness that survived through those centuries of degradation and abuse? Syllia didn’t know.

She had hated them. She had hated them with every fiber of her being. But even that hatred had quailed in the face of an innocent child, and even the cold calculus of a long brooded and plotted revenge could not have deadened her heart to that stirring of… she knew not what. But it had held her hand, and it had made her turn away and leave him there as the last living of heir of that damned, accursed, bloodstained house.

Those wide, staring eyes were still burned into her memory even now, twenty years after the fact. The deed had been done… she had burst her bonds and begun her long, careful campaign against the persecutors and tormentors of her captive, disenfranchised people… and she could still see that little boy, barely even a toddler, uncomprehendingly grasping his dead mother’s hand and ineloquently imploring the woman with whines of “Mama… Mama…” She could still see those clear gray eyes looking at her, the same eyes as all his family. They were the eyes she had feared and hated and cursed with all her furious resentment, the eyes she had hoped to close forever and never see again.

But those very eyes now looked at her like things of naked steel.

That scared little boy now a man of full stature, tall and grim and fierce. He was the spitting image of his father and his grandfather and his great grandfather, yet he was also as unlike them as a stranger. Where their faces had been full and fleshed out, their forms not fat but well-fed and given to ease, he was lean and wiry, with shadowed eyes and corded muscle and a figure that wasted not one ounce of flesh on needless fluff. He had a hungry look, icy with hate and hardened by suffering, intense with a deadly determination. He was here for her, and he was ready for her.

He was ready, and she was not.

“No…!” Syllia gasped, the dark elf taking a step back in her tent. “You…?! How was this possible? Where were her guards?

The elf shook her head. Even without her guards and her followers, she had her own magic, her own power. There were no human mages who could compare with her any longer, and she felt no magic from the man before her. That unhappy, forlorn scion of her detested late masters would not be able to overpower her. She could easily defeat him. She could easily kill him.

But now, as when first she spared him, something stopped Syllia. Then, it had been something like pity. Now, she felt it as fear.

She was stunned by the sight of the man, shaken by those eyes, eyes she had been taught by hundreds of years of suffering and pain and solitude to fear and obey even though she resented them. It had taken her so much steeling of the nerves and so many decades of stored up hate to finally overcome those eyes and free herself from bondage, and even then, only by acting before she could think about what she was doing. Now, caught at unawares after twenty years of grim liberty, she beheld them anew with a virgin dread, as helpless before that cold, clear, steely glare as she had been when this man’s great-great-great-grandfather first took her from her mother and broke her.

Syllia was paralyzed by a fear that overpowered her hate. On her brow, she felt the brand of her Oathmark itching, and for an instant of utter terror, she knew doubt. If he knew her Oathword, it was over. Already he was opening his mouth, and he drew in breath. If he made to speak the key to her lock, to re-anchor the chain she torn from its moorings, she knew, horribly certain, that she did not now have time to strike him down before he spoke the word and laid her low. Even her swiftest spell would need one chanted syllable, and in the time it took her to draw the breath to give her magic shape, he could utter the dread command to bind her once more and topple all her pride and power and vengeful machinations.

That moment of hesitation, that instant of fear and doubt, would be her undoing.

He spoke, and he moved, and Syllia’s folly was made clear to her as he laid his hands upon her with an iron grip and fixed her eyes with awful, penetrating stare.

“I hate you,” he growled, his voice a nearly breathless rasp. It was no magical command. This was not the word of power graven upon her brow, not that awful utterance the absolute dread of which had been branded centuries of pain and humiliation into her bosom… yet it seized her all the same, like a sorcerous invocation working upon her mind and sinews, rendering her powerless at the sight of his eyes and the feel of his hands and the sound of his growling voice. She quailed in his grasp like a neophyte thrall, made fearful and helpless just long enough with centennial recollections of humiliation and torment for him to throw her down and straddle her, pinning her irresistibly, inescapably beneath him. “I’m going to make you pay. I’m going to end this.”

Long years of memory cascaded over Syllia, as black and dismal as a winter flood, and her mind reach back through the centuries, back to the beginning, as she tried in her anger and despair to make sense of what was happening.

She remembered it all. She remembered the tale as her masters had taught her — the only knowledge they had given her, meant to deepen her submission and justify her abuse. She remembered, and she lay in shock as the last vengeful scion of her murdered masters bared her dark skin and held her powerless beneath him.

It had started nearly a thousand years ago, centuries and centuries before she had ever been born…


	2. Chapter 2

In the beginning, there had been the war between the humans and the dark elves. Syllia vaguely understood that there had been centuries and millennia of history preceding that conflict, and that for a long time, humans and the elven kindreds had lived relatively harmoniously together. But one day that had come to an end, and the humans and the dark elves fought bitterly to destroy each other. Syllia’s masters had taught her that the blame for that war lay on the elves, that the dark elves had been cruel and treacherous, and that they had deceived humanity and stabbed them in the back.

Syllia didn’t want to believe that that was the case. There had been a time, in her early years, when she had believed it and submitted to the cruelty of her master’s out of a sense of ingrained guilt and self-loathing. It had taken her decades to shake herself free from the shackles of human indoctrination, and even if she knew no positive truth contradicting their claims, she was certain that the blame for the war lay at human feet – that they had feared and hated and envied the elves. She was certain that her people had been blameless, that their treatment was unwarranted and egregious. Nay, even if the dark elves had done everything her master’s claimed they had done, she refused to accept that that justified what the humans had done to them.

It was nothing but cruelty and malice on the part of humanity. They were petty, hateful, violent creatures. They were low, ignoble, contemptible… vermin deserving eradication, deserving to be expunged from the world or subjugated and enslaved by their betters. Everything they claimed to justify their deeds was false, all lies and trickery, and they were less than beasts, worse than fiends, responsible for all the suffering and misery that had come forth in the half millennium since the war. If they had lost and been wiped out, it would have been for the best. But humanity had not lost the war. Her masters credited this to brilliant strategies, powerful magic, and superior numbers – and in that much, at least, Syllia believed them.

Horrid and dishonorable as humans were, repugnant in their insatiable lasciviousness and their beastly fecundity, they had pushed the dark elf nation to the brink of destruction. Though the elven wizards had been superior in their individual might and prowess, humanity’s battlemages had numerous and expendable, more than willing to cut their already brief lifespans that little bit shorter to spit in the eye of their superiors and crush the elves under the sheer weight of their corpses. Indeed, so numerous were the humans, and so careless with their own lives, that they readily doubled the fronts on which they had to fight when they began to believe that the distant kin of the dark elves—the high elves and the wood elves—had been aiding the dark elves.

Her masters had long praised the insight and valor of their ancestors, who had played some trivial part in the war, and Syllia had been told many different tales many times over – the tale had gradually mutated and enlarged the role of their ancestors over decades and generations. The tales of her masters promised how selflessly the noble human troops had dared the enchanted forests and hidden cities of the light elves. How many times had she been told those damnable war stories and shown the dusty, antique commendations passed down in that house as heirlooms? How often had her masters told her in fanciful and offensive detail of the fate of the elven kindreds, of the dark elves who had already been pushed back into their last strongholds, of the high elves and the wood elves who were taken seemingly at unawares by the “insight and daring” – ruthlessness and treachery – of the humans? Too often. If she wished, she could have recited the stories from memory. She hated them.

But whatever the cause of the war, and whatever the truth or falsity of human suspicions regarding the actions of the other elf kindreds, one truth was undeniable. It had ended ultimately in utter defeat for the elves — for all elves, everywhere. Those elf men who had led and fought in the elven armies were executed to the last one, and of the rest, most were lost to persecution and slaughter. While unlike with humans, both elf men and elf women were equally strong and agile, and their forces comprised nigh evenly of men and women, of the female generals, soldiers, and mages, as few as possible had been killed. “As few as possible”, of course, still meant thousands of dead bodies strewn across battlefields, cut down in combat and defiled in the rush of victory, raped while they lay dying or hacked apart and used as rations. Her masters had told family accounts of this as amusing tales, passing down the rapacious deeds of their forebears like dirty jokes to tell in the parlor.

Of elven men, only one in ten survived the war and the purges of the decades following, killed in battle or lynched by mobs for the least imagined offense. Many of elven women had perished too, whether valiantly as soldiers (if later dishonored in their death by wicked use or degrading disposal), or more ignobly as captives made to suffer the hatred of their masters – a hate still fresh and cruel from the war. Every single survivor of the elven lands had been enslaved, branded with Oathmarks by the mages of the human empire and doled out as payment to the noble families whose sons had shed much, though not all, of the blood spent in the war effort. If this slavery had ever had a pragmatic or remotely reasonable purpose – as far as such things could ever historically be called “reasonable” – to begin with, by the time of Syllia’s birth it devolved into cruelty for cruelty’s sake, and despite their incredible longevity, the lives of many elves were cut short, and their race was gradually dying out.

Equally damning, long before the death of the elven race was even a question, the death of their culture was fated. Of this much, Syllia had infuriatingly thorough knowledge. Not of her culture, of course not, but of how the humans had broken them and erased it. With the Oathmarks upon their brows and the Oathwords that activated them entrusted to the families who received the war’s spoils, the elven slaves had been broken and brainwashed wherever it was possible. The ones who resisted were most utterly subjugated, their minds shattered by the excruciating torment of the magical obedience and torture. Oathmarks, one of the finest creations of human High Magic, was an enchantment that weaved itself through every fiber of the bound being’s body and soul. With but a word spoken by the slave’s rightful owner, the spell would exact indescribable punishment on the mark’s bearer. In a heartbeat of blistering agony it would shut down the victims magic, light their nerves aflame with a mortal agony, and all but blank their minds with anguish in a way that only a second utterance of the Oathword’s second utterance could stop. The humans held absolute power over their slaves, and systemically and systematically, they had quashed out any sense of the original elven identity.

Syllia did not know what her ancestors had been like… and she had searched long and hard to try to find out. Her masters had been the keepers of that dim, unknowable history, and they had colored it deeply with their hatred and contempt. Even then, if they had told her anything useful, she could have consumed it like a starving elf slave licking her meal of cum from the cobblestones, but they told her nothing of the **ways** of her people of old. At this point, Syllia was fairly sure that they didn’t even know the truth any longer – only the rote, ancestral grievances they laid at the feet of the elves, of how Syllia and all her kind deserved everything that had happened to them. Syllia’s mother had certainly told her nothing. Syllia didn’t even know if her mother had known anything, if the woman had been old enough to have lived before the captivity and degradation of their people. She had never had a chance to find out – her masters had raped her to death when Syllia was barely a babe. As far as Syllia knew, she could be two or three generations removed from any free ancestors, and she had been nursed at a human teat and given no more care or instruction than a lowly slave needed… she knew nothing of what it meant to be an elf except that it meant to be a slave. Any history lessons taught to her had only been to ingrain that sense of inferiority and convince her that she deserved it.

She knew so little about what her people had once been like. Only fragments. Even now, she knew little for certain, and back then, she had known nothing — nothing, except that she hated her masters. They had treated her cruelly, and the bare minimal care they’d given to see her grow to maturity had been no more kindness than a farmer feeding and sheltering a hog. If she’d felt any fondness or gratitude for them, knowing nothing else at that time, the trauma of being made into a woman forever solidified her into her hate for them.

Somewhere in her thirties or forties, Syllia had finally lost count of the number of times the humans had raped her – how many times they had shoved their digits or their tongues or their cocks into the various orifices of her body. It was nearly a constant, a barrage of sweaty, pallid flesh that left an acrid stench in her nostrils. Even now, centuries later, the stink of human was enough to make her want to reach into her throat and pull out her own lungs to get rid of it, but she kept counting anyway, until the number was, at last, lost to her. Even now, centuries later, Syllia could still remember that first night… when the young master of the house sneaked into the dark and lonesome room where she slept and taken her. He had sneered at her when she’d struggled in fear and confusion as the rags were torn from her petite, undeveloped body, saying that she was twice his age and more than old enough for something like this. Elves grew slower than humans did, maturing slowly, and she was still small compared to the brutal man. He had raped her while she sobbed and begged him to stop, thrusting himself into a body barely ready for intercourse, bruising her physically and scarring her mentally with his brusque and violent insertion.

She had only dimly understood what he was doing, at the time. She would learn. It had not been the last time, either – He had continued to make use of her while she slowly grew — secretly at first, perhaps concerned about seeming abnormal to the rest of the family for taking interest when she still looked so young, but more openly as he aged, and by the time he was the master of the house, he shared her freely with his likeminded friends. He had said all kinds of things about how he cherished her, and about how what he did with her was something special, yet then he passed her around to his buddies and laughed at her looks of fear and her cries of pain, and he had mocked her and called her a useless piece of meat.

His interest in her waned by the time he was middle aged. Not from a failing libido, surely, for his predations on the youngest maidservants had been an open family secret by that time, but likely more because she was then finally coming into full maturity and she was no longer of interest to his particular deviant proclivities. It wasn’t a relief. That master’s son had been a more natural type, and the rest of the household moved in to take the place of the man who had stolen her virginity. More frequently and more openly, she was used and humiliated, and by then she fully understood that this was the norm for elves. That was how her mother had been treated, and possibly her mother’s mother, maybe even her great grandmother.

She was perhaps a hundred and fifty or so when she lost count of how many masters she’d been given to, passed from man to man, from woman to woman as a fuck toy and a rape doll and a torture slut for their pleasure. There had been a point when Syllia was resigned to that reality, when she had been ready to accept it. Her Oathmark throbbed on her forehead, magic she had been completely unable to understand. She’d lost count of how many times it had been used too, for every slight – or perceived slight – for any hint of rebellion, for failing to please them enough, or for no reason at all but to make her scream, stamping out her will beneath an ocean of dark pain. The few times she had openly defied her masters, they had put her in her place by invoking her Oathword and leaving her to scream and writhe in unceasing agony in a dark, quiet room for a day or two. Almost they had broken her, and almost she had accepted it. Almost, but not quite. For most of the life of her first master’s son, Syllia quietly obeyed, and she was used as his sex slave and personal plaything, sometimes beaten when she failed to please him, sometimes tied up outside the manor for passersby in the lane below to jeer and gawk at. Occasionally she saw other elves, and she saw the absence of spirit in their eyes, forlorn and submissive. Still, Syllia counted.

Her case was not special, in that regard. The treatment to which her masters had subjected her was the norm for elf slaves, be they dark elves or otherwise, and despite their long natural lifespans, it was common enough for an elf to die before her time after being used a bit too roughly a few too many times, restorative magic from the humans being a little bit too slow in coming… And that was only when the elves died by accident. Syllia had also heard tell once or twice of more vicious masters who would do unspeakable things with their elf slaves, asserting the uttermost depths of contempt for them by devaluing them below even slavery. Slaves would usually at least be given enough care to survive and keep serving their masters, but they would disregard the rarity and slow maturation of elves by willfully and brutally cutting those already shortened lifespans even shorter in depraved, gruesome displays.

The one kind thing Syllia could say about her masters was that even the worst of them had spoken disapprovingly of those wasteful, macabre debaucheries… But they had done everything else to her, and by the time her second master had passed her on to his son, Syllia had made a decision. Some days she couldn’t remember what broke her out of the dull, unhappy trance of reflexive submission. Almost she could convince herself that maybe it had been a spontaneous sparking of her own will within her, or maybe it had been some final trespass against the barest shreds of dignity and happiness she was able to muster in that life, or maybe it had been seeing the suffering of some other, unhappy elf at the extremity of human cruelty…

And that thought would always lead to her remembering.

It had been the first time she had met a male of her race. They were so rare, precious few kept alive with any thought of continuing the elven species. Mostly humans expressed total contempt to whether their slaves lived or died, treating the elves more like objects than living things — to live the life of a cow in a pen, wallowing in filth and doing nothing but eat and breed and get milked before finally being slaughtered and served for dinner, would have been a fate nobler and more generous than that to which so many of them were subjected —but at least one or two families seemingly made an effort to keep male elf slaves in order to breed future elves.

When she’d first heard of this practice, Syllia had imagined the males being kept like prize studs, well fed and somewhat kindly treated. There were so few male elves left, and contrary to the old forgotten fables and romances it was not possible for elves and humans to produce offspring together. At the time, Syllia had retained at least some minutest modicum of belief that her masters were good to her. Perhaps it had been only a self-delusion, even back then, but she had wanted to believe it. She had needed to believe it. She had clung to the idea that she would one day at least get to have a child, and her only aspiration was to live long enough to be their for that child as her own mother had not. That was the only thing she could have then **hoped** to have.

Then she had seen how the males of her race were actually treated.

She had no idea how old he’d been, and he wasn’t in any state to tell her. In his mouth there had been no tongue – only a scarred, long ago cauterized stump, and upon his throat were scars that told of his voice box’s removal decades or centuries in the past. His arms went no further than the elbows, ending in stumps, and he was forced to crawl on his knees, apparently hobbled. His frame was bony and emaciated, and his face was an unhealthily pale ashen color that made it impossible to tell if he was an especially dusky dark elf or an sickly elf from the surface. Whatever kind of elf he was, his back was layered in scars after scars after scars from extensive whipping, and between his legs, bolted sadistically into his thighs, was some wrought iron contraption like a primitive chastity belt to prop up an ill-used phallus. It had been a sight to at once make her pity him and feel privileged.

She hated that feeling.

It hadn’t helped that her master — the third one, only recently having inherited her — had only laughed at the sight of the male elf and slipped down his trousers, before handing its owner a fistful of coins and straddling the starved, crippled, belted, and blindfolded wretch of a male. When he told her her they were going to see a male, she had dared to hope that she would be permitted to have a child… to pass something on, to have someone to care for. Instead, he had looked at her with a practiced scorn as he pressed himself into the degraded male, meeting her eye as if daring her to speak out.

“Elves are pathetic, aren’t they?” he’d said caustically. “This is all that your men are. This is all that any of you are.” He had sodomized the stud like he was just another worthless elven cocksleeve before he did the same to Syllia, then sent him home, mute and hopelessly submissive without ever letting her touch him.

Syllia had cried without stopping for days afterward. She wasn’t even sure what had bothered her so much… the dashing of her hope for even a scant future, perhaps? Maybe it was that she had clung to some bizarre hope that the males of her race, being so rare and thus surely more precious, would have been better treated. Her mind had warped through what she had been taught by brutal experience that her suffering was because she was an elf female – that that was why she deserved such violent, degrading treatment. Maybe she had possessed some fanciful idea, some barest romantic hope of meeting a male of her own kind and knowing a worthy and lovable embrace, even were it only so that she would bear forth a new generation of slaves. She had clung to the meager consolation of some nebulous, now half-forgotten fantasy to keep herself sane, but whatever it was that she had latched onto in order to endure her wretched existence, that display had wrenched it from her grasp and forced her face-first into the total, awful reality.

That was when she decided that she was going to take revenge.

At first, it was only a petty hate for her masters, Syllia wanting just to be able to avenge herself on this accursed house and its line. But eventually her visions grew broader, and her hopes creeped higher, and she fantasized not just of revenge for herself, but for all elves everywhere. She hated her masters — she hated humans — and she wanted to make them suffer the way they had made her kind suffer. When she was less honest, she couched her aims nobly and presented an admirable, high-minded conviction, but in her heart even Syllia knew that the root and source of her passion was more selfish. It was a pure, simple, personal hatred and a visceral, gnawing resentment for humanity that had motivated her over the next centuries.

Syllia had heard stories from her masters before then about the elven warriors and priests and mages, and even if they had denigrated their enemies at every turn, the fact that they related their ancestral war stories with so much pride contained a secret they should never have told her… that her people had once been strong. As a female elf, she was treated as a meat toilet and a sex slave, used and degraded until she’d resigned herself to it, but she had retained some idea that, once upon her time, her people had been great and magically powerful… something that humanity had been proud to have defeated.

The secrets of elven magic had long since been lost along with their culture and society… but it wasn’t the only strength. In secret, taking care not to be discovered, Syllia had taught herself to read with agonizing slowness… and then she had begun sneaking away dusty, neglected spell books and studying them. She wasn’t always able to hide what she was doing, and sometimes they would catch her with something she shouldn’t have and punish her. But she was careful, and she was patient. She knew the thing that humans hated the most about her kind… how long they lived compared to humanity’s mere handful of years. Even if ill-use cut short her full rightful span, she should still have a long enough life to take her time, and after a mere several years of good behavior, the humans would forget that she had ever been doing anything inappropriate. Even if they remembered, they would think of it as innocuous after how much time had passed… she didn’t give them enough instances of her being caught for them to notice a pattern. She was careful to act obedient without being too obviously, suspiciously, excessively so, and little by little, decade by decade, she had taught herself in patchwork fragments the high magic of the humans — the very same magic that had defeated and bound her race so many centuries ago.

At around three hundred years, she had lost count of exactly how old she was – too many sunless rooms, too many endless days. She used to count how many times they had nearly killed her, raped her within an inch of her life for their own sick pleasures before dragging her back from the brink, but then she she lost count of that too. Still, Syllia counted. It didn’t matter what she counted… The number of other elves she had seen with her own eyes (eighty nine). How many spells she had learned (three hundred forty seven). How many times she had been whipped today while bound in her frame (115, now 116, 117…). How many times her current master had cum in her mouth this session. (3, so far… her master was having an energetic morning). The number of times the vile bastard had crunched her nose with her pubic bone (31 and counting).

Day and night, she was a dutiful, simpering sex slave, servicing her masters as they bade her, suffering for their amusement. Some of her masters she could escape the attention of by acting sufficiently pathetic… they didn’t all have the heart to use her as brutal as the worst ones. For some, she could bore them by acting just overly affectionate enough to make them tire of her company and dismiss her. She knew all her rapists like she knew her own hands, and she would do anything she had to to earn the right to wander freely just a few minutes earlier and find time to learn and practice. Syllia was always careful… she could never to be caught with something truly incriminating. She had to assemble the entire picture of magic from the corners, using bits that were individually inoffensive and unsuspicious… basic pieces of knowledge. She had to learn magic one gesture, one rune, one spell at a time. Maybe in an entire year, Syllia would stitch together just enough to piece together the principles of a basic cantrip that a mage studying without interruption might get the hang of in the course of a weekend. Syllia really had no one to compare herself to – she had no idea then that she’d been born with strong character and exceptional intelligence and curiosity… traits that were nothing but an inconvenience as a sex slave but made her plan even possible. Little by little, painstakingly slowly even by the measure of an elven patience, Syllia had taught herself the fundamentals of magic, then the deeper secrets, then finally the most difficult and potent of arts.

With a brilliance and a fortitude she barely realized she had, Syllia’s progress began to accelerate… her knowledge and understanding of one art feeding into another. Most mages of comparable talent to her, endowed with identical intellect and self-discipline, would attain competence in a year, expertise in five, and mastery in a decade. Syllia, forced to study so slowly and from such scattered fragments, having also no mentors to whom she could go to explain some unclear point in a text or identify potential errors in her practice of a spell… it took her a century and a half. But she was thorough, and she was careful, and she was patient. She did not settle for anything less than total mastery, refusing to get ahead of herself and lash out after learning just enough to be dangerous. No, she had studied for all that time, learning every spell she could and delving the intricacies of the human high magic. Partly, it had been wariness of sabotaging her own schemes with overconfidence and imprudent haste. If she tried and failed, she would not ever get a second chance. But also she had hoped to discover a way to remove from her brow the ever-present Oathmark, her greatest fear and weakness.

Slowly, Syllia grew to understand the very most fundamental underlying principles of that magic… and she realized something incredible. There was not a human alive who could match her. There was no great need for battlemages in this decadent, peaceful age, and even the masters who now taught in the human academies and served in the human empire’s military would have been considered mediocre at the most generous during the time of the Human-Elf war. After a hundred and fifty years of careful, secret study and practice – prostrating herself ever before her hated masters and satisfying their every desire so as not to be suspected – Syllia was a master of the arts, surpassing any who had lived since before even her mother was born… and in so doing, she realized something equally horrible. The Oathmark could not be removed. It was indelibly woven into her soul and could not be pulled out… she could not even feel it with her own magic, so similar was its nature of her own spirit. Perhaps the Oathmark of another elf she could affect… but her own would forever remain out of her reach.

That knowledge paralyzed her… the knowledge that she would never be strong enough, never be good enough. Centuries of conditioning washed over her, and before she knew it she was seeking reasons to delay using her abilities. Not today… tomorrow she would be stronger. No, not today either, she would only get one change. One more day. One more day. One more day. Still, Syllia counted. She had to count. If she didn’t count, Syllia would lose the one thing that made the dark elf herself… the big number, the one she kept near the front of her mind. How many times she would make her masters scream before she finally killed them. How many of her spells she would unleash into their hateful, wicked flesh before imploding her into her component atoms and reforming them into statues of meat and bile and blood before all the city to see. By then, she was a possession of the great-great-great-great… – great? She wasn’t sure anymore – grandson of the man who had taken her virtue. She did not care to remember his name, and he had not permitted her to call him anything but Master, anyway. But that would have to wait. One more day… one more…

When it began, it was by accident.

Syllia focused on the tube of meat being shoved repeatedly between her lips, and the grunts and groans of her master as he tore at Syllia’s silver hair, pulled the dark elf’s pointed ears, mauled her petite breasts, and viciously raped her mouth. Syllia licked with each thrust. If she didn’t use her tongue the way he liked, the Master would have it cut out before having it healed magically by the house mages at the end of the day, so Syllia licked and suckled the head of the cock each time it passed her tongue, trying not to gag every time it shoved against the back of her throat. That was important. Master didn’t like it when she gagged; last time she had, he’d run a knife through Syllia’s neck to stop her gag reflex and used her mouth until she was nearly dead before he’d healed it… badly.

It was unpleasant, but the physical sensations Syllia could handle. She had been a rape toy for centuries, and she knew how to pleasure all manner of humans. it was the words emitting from her Master’s mouth which made the hate in Syllia’s heart growl and twist.

“Filthy knife-eared little whore,” moaned the nobleman as he pumped the elf’s mouth, grunting in time to the whip that landed harshly on the dark elf’s. The chambermaid who was whipping her was new to this task – the master liked to rotate which members of the staff he used to break and humiliate Syllia and make sure the entire household used like a toy – so her strokes often went off center and sometimes missed entirely. The girl was also tiring – something that Syllia was grateful for – so the whip sometimes landed softly enough that it merely caused incredible pain rather than tongue-chewing agony. “Immortal little bitch,” he growled as he thrust. “I’ll show you how immortal you are when I choke you to death on my human cock. I wish I had twenty of you elves to torture and snuff at my pleasure. Fuck. you’re all worse than cockroaches – at least those filthy creatures have the decency to die properly when you smash them underfoot. You whores, with your slim bodies and your long legs and your big eyes… tempting good, upstanding people to sin…”

Fire burned in Syllia, but she kept silent. Not just because her mouth was too plugged to retort, but because the last time she had failed to hold her tongue perfectly she had spent two days being continuously drowned in a cauldron, gulping for air and screaming for mercy as she was lowered over and over into the boiling water. Not a single scar remained from that incident – even the weak magics of the house mages were sufficient to heal her without a mark, but sometimes Syllia still woke up screaming, the sound of bubbles in her ears.

Instead Syllia offered a quiet prayer to any god of her people that was left, for her sisters and whichever brothers still remained. They surely had to endure as bad of treatment as she did, or worse. She prayed for anyone listening to lift her sisters from their slavery and torture. One day. one day she would find them and free them…

But that one day was not today, and as the nobleman howled in pleasure as he fucked Syllia’s mouth, gripping her hair passionately and slamming his cock into her narrow elven throat, Syllia felt the foul organ twitching. She forced herself not to retch… but her master withdrew the fleshy cylinder and began to stroke it with his perfect, pale white hand. As her master unloaded his fourth round of seed onto Syllia’s face, splattering her pretty elven features with disgusting white globs of wretched human cum, Syllia counted them too. Six. Seven. Eight. She had to count. She always had to count.

“Gods,” moaned her master as he fell back into her chair, the chambermaid continuing to whip. “Gods I needed that. The council is being so godsdamn stubborn, and my useless shit of a wife…”

Syllia fought to catch her breath and counted gasps. She knew she should be absorbing every iota of information about the humans in order to better plot her revenge, but there was almost nothing left in her mind but centuries of rage brought on by hate, and the numbers. She knew, vaguely, that her master was some important human noble, that the family was only a few steps removed from the human throne, and that he hated his wife and had only married her to move him a few steps closer to that throne. She knew he had a mistress, the woman he actually cared for, and that somewhere in the house there was a girl, their daughter. She knew that the wife was pregnant from the last time she had seen her. She knew a lot of things… but otherwise each day was an endless gallery of pain, and rape, and hatred.

“h, stop already you wretched whelp,’ moaned her master to the chambermaid. Panting with exhaustion, she dropped the whip, and Syllia was silently grateful that the whipping stopped. “Go change out of those filthy rags before your stink makes me vomit… and fetch me Elira!”

The chambermaid, wearing clothes that Syllia could only have described as being impossibly fine, fled the room.

Her master wore dark black silks, strewn all over his body in some human fashion that Syllia didn’t understand but had seen often enough that she understood it must be fashionable. The silks crisscrossed his body, covering it in what had to be an exhausting amount of effort. Using his foot, he tipped Syllia’s chin upwards.

Syllia didn’t like to look at her master; it was too hard to keep her face from contorting into a mask of pure hatred. He was fairly young, even for a human… somewhere in his twenties perhaps, with a face that even an elf would consider graceful; pale white skin, and long, black silken hair which tumbled down his back like a waterfall. Her face, however, was twisted with cruel intent as she reached over with one arm. “And you,” she said, pulling Syllia’s ear, making her scream. “What do you say?”

“Thank you Master,” Syllia said automatically. “Thank you for teaching me my place as a worthless cum dump for your almighty cock. I am naught but rape meat for you, Master, a receptacle for your noble seed, a fuck doll for your pleasure. I am not fit to lick the shit from your arse, Master…” A bit over the top, but that was how he liked it.

He snorted. “Well spoken, for a knife-ear,” said her Master, twisting Syllia’s ear. “Perhaps one day you’ll actually make me believe it.” He turned to the door. “I can hear you breathing, Elira. Come in instead of panting all over the fucking door.”

The door opened and a girl walked in. A human child… it had been several years since she had seen the Master’s daughter by his mistress. She was tiny, no higher than perhaps Syllia’s hip if she were standing. She looked like a smaller version of her father… the same sharp features, the same dark hair, but with her mother’s green eyes rather than the hated, dead grey of her Master. Syllia saw the scion of the man who had tortured her for years and imagined wringing the tiny thing’s neck in its sleep.

“Elira, you know our elf,” said the Master to his daughter. “Even you could not possibly be so stupid as not to. We’ve had her since before you were born. Say yes, father.”

“Yes, father,” said Elira, keeping her eyes off of Syllia’s naked, bleeding body, her father’s cum still spattered on her face.

“She is our family’s elf, which makes her a plaything. See this mark on her forehead?” said the nobleman, using a toe to point out the nearly invisible magical brand. “Our Oathmark. One word, and you will remind her who she belongs to.”

Elira said nothing, staring at her bare feet.

“I’m assured by your tutors,” her father growled, “That you have shown magic potential. That should should be able to read it. What does it say, Elira?”

Almost reluctantly the young girl looked up. “Itharien,” Elira read automatically. Syllia winced, expecting to feel the fire surge through her… but nothing came.

The Master scowled, and Syllia, her adrenaline having surged and finding no release, understood only slowly. Elira wasn’t a legitimate daughter… the Oathword only worked when it was spoken by her owner. From her lips, it was just sound.

She barely had time to feel relieved before her Master turned back to her, his lips moving to form the dreaded word… and every nerve, every muscle, every cell in her body was subjected to an avalanche of pain as the magical bind sent agony coursing through all of her. She saw her Master’s cock harden as she watched Syllia scream and writhe in pure agony. It felt like ice and fire simultaneously eating at every part of her… it felt like being ripped apart. She couldn’t breathe. She could only scream until she ran out of breath and then continue to scream anyway, tring to reclaim muscles that were tensing fit to snap, fighting her body to get even a single gasp.

“Itharien,” her Master said after what felt like a year, but judging by the step backwards the child had just taken, must have been just a moment or two. “Useless,” he growled. He produced a small dagger and placed it in the child’s hand, closing her tiny fingers around it and patting gently. “Make a mark on her.”

“m…mark her?” the child whispered.

“Anywhere,” her Master confirmed. “Just cut her. Show her she is yours.” Syllia lay on the ground catching her breath slowly, whimpering softly. That would be enough for the Oathmark… one more brand to prove ownership. One more mark.

“Father, I don’t want to,” Elira trembled, tears falling from her bright eyes.

“It is not a matter of want, Elira, you must. This will be your elf someday. You must cut her.”

The girl stood, unmoving, and the nobleman shoved the child forward. “DO IT ELIRA!”

Her Master dragged his daughter close but the girl’s face was screwed up in tears. “Father, no! I don’t want to hurt her!”

Silence.

Syllia breathed, deep ragged breaths, and she did not see the look on her Master’s face as she dragged Elira from the room by her arm, the dagger clattering to the floor. There were a trio of smacking sounds and a child’s scream, followed shortly after by a loud thud, and then sobbing.

“Useless whelp,” her Master’s cruel voice came through the thick door of the dungeon. “Be grateful my son is not yet born… If I knew he would be sufficient, I would slit your stupid cow throat!” Another smack. “How dare you embarrass me in front of a slave? How dare you bring dishonor onto your family name?”

“Father I’m sorry I’m sorry,” babbled the child as the master of the house hit his daughter again. “I’m sorry…”

“You don’t even know what you’re sorry for, you pig-headed idiot!” the nobleman hit her, and hit her, and hit her. “Get out of my fucking sight!”

Syllia heard footsteps as the child fled, and a moment later the door opened again and the Master strode in. He picked up the dagger from the floor and, without hesitation, slammed it into Syllia’s chest. The dark elf’s scream was ragged at the metal pierced a lung, a wet, gurgling noise in the cry of pain. “Right,” he said, reaching between Syllia’s legs and spreading her cheeks. “It looks like I am going to have to be the one to reinforce this lesson myself. Whose are you, little worm?”

“I am yours, Master,” whispered Syllia, grunting, unable to get air through her rapidly collapsing lung.

“Say it like you fucking mean it, you horrible fucking wretch!”

“I, aah!” Syllia screamed as her mistress penetrated her bowels, pushing hard against the dry walls. “I serve only you, Master… my pitiful life… my filthy body… are yours – aaah! – to command, to use, to rape and torture and break as you de – AAAH! – desire…”

“Good,” moaned her Master as he raped Syllia for what must have been the thousandth time. Syllia tried to count her own breaths – six, seven, eight – but when his hands went around her neck she could barely do even that. “Choke for me, little elven bitch. Suffocate like the rape slut you are…”

“Master!” Syllia choked, ropes of cum dangling from her face as she was rocked in her frame by the nobleman’s savage thrusts. She could feel her voice going. “Master, I beg you… please…”

But her Master was lost in pleasure and rage, his fingers squeezing tighter and tighter around Syllia’s neck as he fucked her in a frenzy. Syllia could feel panic rising within her. Her master had brought her close to death many times, but always slowly, controlled, long sessions of planned pain and endless torture as she was baked alive, or burnt at a stake by magical fire, or flayed to make a leather rug for her mistress’ bedroom. It wasn’t like that now. Her Master was in a fury, and when he was he tended to lose control… Whipping Syllia until the bones showed, Tearing her limb from limb before reattaching them, Raping her eye socket with each thrust coming dangerously close to destroying her brain. It felt like that now. As Syllia felt the blackness creeping into her vision with every thrust, felt the fingers squeezing harder and harder, unable to speak, she could feel it…

No. No, not like this. She hadn’t… She hadn’t… finished… counting…

A burst of light appeared at Syllia’s neck, forcing her Master’s hands back as Syllia gulped beautiful, sweet air, gasping and coughing as her dark face sucked in as much as she could. It was a blessed relief… until she realized what she had instinctively done.

Turning her head, she saw the shock on her Master’s face quickly turning into rage…

Syllia was very, very fast. She was an elf, eternal, nearly ageless, and she had spent centuries practicing her magic… but she was afraid. Hesitant. She had never used it before. As fast as Syllia was, her Master was fasted. she was faster. “ITHARIEN!” screamed her Master, still hip-deep inside Syllia’s arse. Syllia could feel the throb of the princess’s cock as her entire body began to shake so hard she broke tore muscles. “You fucking traitorous little worm! Where the fuck did you learn magic? Who taught you?” he growled. “WHO!?’

Syllia could not answer. Her body was wracked by magical pain… but her soul hurt even worse. Now she knew the truth. She would never leave this place. She had given up her one secret, her one ace, her one weapon. All her counting, all her numbers, her centuries of holding out hope, all came down to one, final, inescapable fact…

She been defeated, completely and utterly. She was going to die in this room.


	3. Dig Two Graves 2 – John Drake's Stories

“Hey,” whispered Marcus by the kitchen door. Stablehands were not supposed to be in the mansion… but Elira pretended not to hear as she ate her soup; Marcus already didn’t like her and sometimes put her horse into a bad mood before Elira’s riding lessons. “Hey, Bethany!”

“What?” whispered the young scullery maid who was stationed by the door. It was an open secret that the two had been sleeping together… it wasn’t exactly permitted, but her parents weren’t really in much condition to care these days. They were both speaking low enough that the various house staff, including the head butler, could pretend to ignore them. Apart from Elira, they were the only ones in the room; her father and mother had “retired early to bed” – she knew it was to stuff that disgusting powder up their noses, the contraband crystal from down south.

Elira heard a quiet jingling sound from behind the kitchen door, and Bethany giggled and squeed, escaping into the kitchen. Apparently it was their turn tonight to abuse and torture the poor elf girl.

One of the… many… side effects of that horrid crystal was that her ‘noble’ father had felt less capable of raping the girl in the dungeon with the vigor he’d had in his younger days, before all the responsibilities of maintaining the new alliances had fallen onto his head. He still was punishing her for… something… however. Still wanted Syllia to know her place. She’d drawn up a rotation for all her household staff to take turns slaking their lusts on the poor thing. At first Elira had been including in it, but she told her mother she’d rather cut her own throat before laying a finger on poor Syllia, and she had spoken to her father, and she was left out. She, Joseph, and her half-brother Andrew were the only ones who were… and he only was because he was so young.

The thought that her own father would have made Elira, a girl barely more than twelve who hadn’t even had her first bleeding yet, force herself upon the elf just to show her dominance made her sick. The cruelty of that thought made her want to throw up her soup. It was bad enough to have to listen as each of the house staff went down into that cellar… sometimes Elira could hear the screams from her bedroom. She hated it here… but for years what choice did she have?

“Did my lady have a good fencing lesson today?” Joseph asked. The head butler was the only member of staff whom Elira considered a friend… the only one who didn’t make her feel less for being a daughter of the mistress of the house rather than its Matron. He was also the only other one who didn’t seem to relish abusing the elf girl, her distant noble pedigree giving her the ability to refuse. It often felt like the tall, dark-skinned man could read Elira’s mind, piercing straight to the heart of what troubled her.

“Master Wellen says I am improving very quickly,” she said, repeating what she had been told. “I have been recommended to join the cadets… and just in time.” She gave a soft smile. They both knew that her Father was sending her away as soon as possible… he had been trying to find an excuse ever since his son was born.

“I will miss you, flower,” Joseph said in his smooth, southern accent. “But truly my lady, your magical talent is… incredible. Perhaps you should consider a career with the mage’s council, or the Inquisitors. From my understanding you could have a long and fruitful life there.”

She knew why Joseph was saying this, just as Joseph knew why Elira would refuse. Her Father was part of the noblemen who controlled the Mage’s Council and she would rather die than spend a moment under her Father’s control… and the most frequent task a new recruit in the Inquisition was given was torture.

“I shall take your kind advice into consideration,” whispered Elira, spooning the last of her soup into her mouth. “May I please be excused?”

“You may,” Joseph replied, pulling out Elira’s chair. It had just been a few months ago that Elira’s feet could not touch the floor from a seated position. Now she was about to get into a carriage and be gone from this place.

She didn’t know what possessed her in that moment when she was walking past Joseph – maybe it was just that there had been so much going on lately, with her absent parents and the constant reminders that soon she would have to be a part of her grim society – but Elira threw her arms around the butler in his fine blue uniform. Slowly, gently he returned the hug.

“I love you Joseph,” said Elira, sniffing. “I know you’re always looking out for me.”

“My lady, you already know the contents of my heart,” smiled the older man. “I shall always be here for you… no matter when you return. Cadet, Inquisitor, Mage’s Guild… come to the end of the world.”

“Who knows,” whispered Elira. “Maybe one day, with enough of that dust in her nose, my Father will finally love me too.”

“Maybe one day,” Joseph whispered back, kissing the top of Elira’s head. “Truly, I wish that for you more than anything else. Now, to your carriage my lady… before you are late.”

And so, with the first smile on her face in months, Elira put on her coat and went to her carriage that would take her away from this place, to the capital and to her destiny… feeling just a little better about the state of the world.

* * *

“Aaah!” moaned Bethany, rubbing her cunt into Syllia’s dark lips as she gripped the elf’s silvery hair in one hand, riding her face for all she was worth. “Oh fuck! Aah! Oh gods!” Bethany gripped the elf’s metal collar, comforted by its ever-present warmth as she shuddered and came hard on the girl’s lips.

“Oh she feels so good,” hissed Marcus as he wrapped his hands around Syllia’s hips and thrust into her unresisting body. “Gods, it’s been so long since our last turn with this bitch… no offense Bethany, but even that sweet cunt of yours hasn’t got anything on this knife-eared bitch. I can see why they’re bred to be slaves… she’s so fucking tight! Ohh!” He punctuated his point by throwing Syllia’s legs around her shoulders and began to pound her, making the elf’s body jiggle with each thrust of his powerful hips.

“Tell me about it,’ Bethany moaned, coming down off the high of her orgasm. “God I wish we could use that Oathword on her… it would be great to really make her scream. She’s a bit… pathetic now.” The maid sighed. “No life in her at all.” She slapped the elf in the face, hard. “are you in there, you worthless piece of shit?” Bethany said, staring at Syllia’s dead eyes. She backhanded her. “Say something, you little rape doll!”

“She hasn’t said a word in five years, or so the cook says,” moaned Marcus, gripping Syllia’s tits and beginning to pump in earnest. “Completely gone in the head. Still tight as a button down here, though…’

“Gods, sometimes I wish I’d been born with a cock,” sighed Bethany as she pinched Syllia’s nose and mouth shut just to hear the elf gasp for breath. “Or enough magic to make one. That looks like so much fun.”

“I did bring… a little toy… for you” Marcus grinned, nodding to the bag he’d brought with him. “You want a piece of this elf ass? I promise, if you fuck them in the bum your cock doesn’t stop tingling for a week.”

The naked Bethany scrambled to the bag, pulling out the leather harness and the stiff wooden shaft. “Ooh, it’s enchanted?” She curled up against Marcus and kissed him softly. “Don’t mind if I do…”

The moment she put the harness on, the tingling sensation began. These strap-on cocks were a simple enough magical artifact, but popular and for good reason – within seconds, Bethany could feel the length of wood as if it were real flesh and blood. Within just a few more seconds, the two lovers had levered Syllia’s limp form between them, moaning in pleasure as they raped her frail little body, their naked bottoms on the cold stone as they worked their hips, pumping their shafts into her ass and cunt.

“Gods it feels amazing! It’s like my clit is on fire!” moaned Bethany as she gripped onto Syllia’s collar for balance, the warm metal sending a pleasant sussuration of sensation down her arm. “What is this thing anyway, and why is it warm? Is it magic too?”

“Bethany, please shut up,” Marcus moaned. “I’m really close…”

“Here, let me help you…” grinned the girl as she reached between Syllia’s legs and began to stroke her lover’s cock with one hand, listening to her partner groan at the added sensation.

“Oh fuck, oh yesss,” Marcus hissed, his thick hips pounding at Syllia’s thin body as Bethany masturbated him. “Oh Beth, just like that… yes, you know how I like it…”

“You mean raping elf meat?” Bethany teased, pulling hard at the collar, making it bite into Syllia’s neck. She could see the metal bruising the elf’s dark skin so she pulled even harder, her loins twitching at the choking noises the elf made. “God I wish I could afford one of these knife-eared sluts… I’d really show her the meaning of pain…”

“Maybe a more alive one,” laughed Marcus, still thrusting hard. “Still, it’s really fun to… ahh… fuck an… unconscious… little… elf girl… Oh! Oh! Oh Beth! I’m cumming! Don’t stop, girl, don’t stop!” Marcus arched his back in ecstacy, making the dark-skinned girls tits bounce as he came deep into Syllia’s cunt, spurting jet after jet of thick seed into the elf’s pussy. Bethany moaned low in her throat as she began to cum too, ramming her thin hips against Syllia’s ass, howling as she orgasmed. In the height of his pleasure, Marcus stumbled backwards, almost falling, and he reached out to steady himself… and the first thing his hand grabbed was the metal collar, already straining beneath incredible energy and Bethany’s grip. As Marcus gripped the warm metal and pulled the band the other way, there was a brief shriek of stressed metal, a tiny burst of light… and the metal snapped.

* * *

Two thousand, seven hundred, and eighty three days without hope.

Syllia had counted every one of them.

The sound of the rune collar, the band of spell-covered steel that had suppressed her magic, snapping was like the sound of the first ice cracking in spring. The breath she had been using to keep her sanity afloat for the better part of the last decade rose in her as the warm thing broke from her throat, and Syllia rose, rose, rose…

The human man with his cock inside her looked, wide eyed, as Syllia’s eyes focused for the first time in years, and her elven face twisted into a snarl.

“OH GODS!” was the last thing Marcus ever said, fear clouding her eyes. And then Syllia blew his fucking head off of his neck with a single starburst of magic, the room splattering in shards of bone, brains, and hair. A gray eyeball landed on Bethany’s face, the girl screaming as she realized what was happening. She tried to pull her wooden cock out of Syllia’s ass and get to her feet, but the elf reached behind her and grabbed Bethany’s face.

Any attempt to beg was burned from the poor girl as Syllia set her face on fire. She screamed and writhed as the flame spread, her slender body quickly being consumed by dark flames, her breasts spitting and cooking, her eyes popping as they boiled. She was dead in seconds, collapsing to the ground, and Syllia herself fell to the cold stone, her muscles weak from years of atrophy. she had been underfed – her skin clung to her ribs, her hair was stringy, falling out in clumps where her rapists had pulled at it.

But she would have time to restore herself. No more hesitation. No more waiting.

Syllia would never be a slave again.

The Dark Elf began her revenge.

She was still naked, but she did not care. The lock on the door posed no problem as she blasted it from its hinges and stepped out into the house, seeking her lifetime of vengeance. Her masters and their household didn’t have a chance. If she was honest, even this cursed master had not been the worst of the masters she’d had, but this was far from a generous statement. He had not done anything egregious compared to the other masters she’d had, but he hadn’t treated her any less awfully than the rest, either. It was no virtue on his part, but only the absence of a special, noteworthy cruelty that caused her to remember him thus. He had still used her and degraded her the same as the rest, and when he’d punished her, he’d never been gentle. His wife had been a dreadful woman as well, scorning Syllia and disdaining her like she was a filthy animal, treating her like she was lower than dirt. The master’s mistress had been little kinder, and the maids and servants had not been shy to vent on their only inferior all their own little frustrations and resentments, either. None of them had been kind. She had hated them all.

She killed them all.

First, she encircled the house with a ward to prevent any escape, then she walked into her master’s bedchambers and uttered a curse of decay. Aging by decades in seconds, the man had shriveled into dust before he could open his mouth to utter the Oathword, looking up at her in uncomprehending fear. Then, Syllia had gone to work on the rest of the household. She petrified the butler when he stumbled across her and shattered her with a rune of force. She cast the maids into an enchanted slumber before taking up a knife and eviscerating them, remembering all the cruelties she had suffered at the hands of maids who yearned after their masters and resented her for being favored, believing her to enjoy the loathsome ravishes of her masters, believing that she stole from them the love that they longed for, hating her also for being perpetually young and beautiful, even when dirty and ill-fed. Man and woman alike, she slew them all… striking quickly. After the first moments, everyone in the house with the right to use her Oathword was dead and she started in on the others. Every time she even thought about holding back, or tried to remember if this girl or than man had hurt her, she remembered how generations of men and woman, their many predecessors had used and abused her, resenting the girl and her forebears their dignity, and killed them just the same.

The old matron of the house, the mother of the master who quietly lived out her autumn years in the care of the household’s servants, she constrained with an ethereal binding before invoking blasts of lightning to rack and blacken the withered old crone, thunder shaking the walls repeatedly even long after the woman was dead, and the smoking ruin of her corpse filled the room with a black, burning stench. And the guests of the household she fell upon at unawares, who ran in useless panic from the estate’s unknown attacker, unable to escape and not realizing who it was that besieged the manor, by then knowing something was terribly wrong but not yet aware of the cause. A friend of the master she gutted with scything winds, thinking of how many such men had borrowed her and dirtied her in the past.

Then, last of all, Syllia found the wife of the master and his mistress hiding in the room of the young son of the house. They were pale and shaking and begging for mercy. The Master’s Wife was a threat… so Syllia made her clutch her throat and uselessly gurgle, tears spilling from bulging eyes as Syllia conjured brackish water in her throat to drown her on dry land and stop her from speaking that hated word.

“Please!” the mistress shrieked, wailing while the other woman drowned. “Please, stop! You monster… Aren’t you satisfied?! What have we done to you?! We’ve fed you! We’ve given you a home! We own you!”

Even in her efforts to appeal to some kindly sentiment and beg for mercy, the woman had betrayed how she really saw the elf, too entrenched in her contempt for Syllia to be truly sorry for anything. She saw nothing wrong with how the elf had been treated. Syllia could only laugh softly. And why should she? That had been the way of things for longer than anyone now alive could remember, the simple and unquestioned order of society for half a millennium. She could not have conceived of the idea that it was wrong to treat Syllia as she had been treated, and it never entered the realm of possibility that enslaving and raping and murder an ancient sapient race to the point of genocide could be anything but natural and just. That was the way of things she had always known them, the law of the land into which she had been born. Nobody had questioned it, and nobody had wanted to change it. The humans were content, and they felt not pity nor the least compassion for their elven thralls.

It infuriated her.

Hardened by her own hatred, Syllia struck the woman with the cruelest fate she could imagine. Her extensive studies had taught her that there was no way to remove an existing Oathmark… but she could create a new one. With a touch of her finger and a growled command, Syllia branded the pale-skinned human’s brow, winding the magics into her soul until the word of command was at one with her essence. The magic’s integration was a spiritual rape, a torment as horrible as the flames of perdition, yet this agonizing defilement was only the prelude. Syllia met the mistress’ eyes, watching with numb pleasure as she watched the woman shake and weep, curled upon the floor in agony, in despair… and then she intoned the word and loosed the hellish power of the Oathmark upon the woman’s brow, watching coldly and dispassionately as her victim screamed and writhed and clawed at herself, kicking and thrashing in horrible seizures of agony. The woman rent her clothes and tore them from her frame as if in grief, but the only thing in her eyes was a madness of pain, and Syllia had stood there and watched, regretting nothing and feeling nothing as she waited for the woman to die from the pain. That was how her mother had perished, her Oathmark invoked and left to rack her beyond mortal endurance until she expired in the dark, neither noticed nor missed… it comforted her to watch that pain be returned to a deserving woman.

Her mother had lasted more than a day. This woman was weak, but it still took a while before her screaming stopped… hours, probably. For once, Syllia didn’t count.

When she finally was silent, Syllia perceived with a ringing in her ears that the house was finally, deathly silent. All but one had been slain. Just one more, and she would be free of these people forever…

“Mama…?”

She saw the last member of the house, barely more than a babe. His eyes were wide and innocent, understanding nothing of what had happened, of what had been done hitherto. He was merely a toddler, lacking comprehension, lacking culpability as he knelt over his drowned mother, bumping her face gently with his tiny hands.

Syllia had felt hatred, looking at him, and she had raised her knife when he clutched at his mother’s unmoving form, ready to strike him down and free herself forever.

But…

Something held her back.

Pity? Fear? Exhaustion?

Her heart was heavy, and she was tired. She had done much that night, and it left her drained both magically and emotionally. The catharsis of revenge… it didn’t feel like she hoped it would. Something tasted bitter in the back of her throat as she looked at that weeping toddler.

She was wiser than her masters, and even if that wisdom had been clouded by hundreds of years of hatred… maybe there was something inside her that could still feel compassion, something in her that could still see how senseless it would be to slay this child, who alone of all in the manor bore no guilt upon his shoulders, none at all save that of being descended from her hated masters. And maybe, after suffering so much with the alleged crimes of her ancestors as the only justification given, Syllia wondered if it was right to punish those who had no association with guilt but by bloodline’s descent. Maybe she had spared him out of an atrophied compassion, the last act of pity she would ever show a human. Maybe she had turned away because she was tired and wanted to leave. Maybe she was afraid of becoming no better than her masters, or maybe she felt that leaving the boy to starve with nobody to care for him would be sure enough to kill him, the only punishment he needed.

Syllia didn’t know. She only knew that she had dropped the knife and walked away, leaving the boy to sob.

“Mama… Mama…” the voice behind her repeated, over and over… but Syllia never looked back at that accursed, detestable household. She abandoned him to his fate and strode forward, thinking of greater vengeance still to come… vengeance that would finally provide the comfort she needed. She would not be satisfied with just killing her masters. She would not be satisfied with just her own freedom. She hated humanity, and she would not stop until she had punished them all. They had tried to wipe out her people… she would succeed in eliminating theirs.

Syllia had left behind the tattered house of Tarn and its last surviving heir, the infant Andrew. The Oathmark on her brow would be all the reminder she needed of why she did this, and it would give her the resolve she needed to carry out her campaign.

But it would also be her downfall, the source of her only weakness… and her greatest fear.

* * *

The next evening was the beginning of her campaign. The town of Dunloch ten miles from the Tarn manor was emptied of life in a single night, its human inhabitants slaughtered and their elf slaves set free. The humans were slain and the town was laid waste, reduced to ruins. They could not resist — Syllia’s magic was too powerful for them to fight back against, the greatest mages in the town mere children compared to her.

With their master’s dead, she turned her attention to the human’s branded thralls, elves of all kinds. Her people greeted her at first with dismay and horror, fearing punishment… it took a surprisingly long time for them to fully understand that they were free… and their their Masters could not defeat Syllia. That freedom was theirs.

At first, they lauded the slim, malnourished Dark Elf as a hero… but when she used her magic to mend their bodies, and spoken with fire in her voice to awaken their slumbering souls, they acclaimed her as a goddess… one of the long-forgotten elves goddesses returned to them to save them from their dark fates. Their worship was… uncomfortable… to Syllia, but it brought them hope and she did not dissuade them. Still, Syllia was careful over the following years… taking revenge on humanity only one town at a time, choosing always remote centers of population. There were plenty of those… the human empire was truly sprawling and agrarian. It took years before she realized with boiling blood that most of the fields the humans were farming now were clear cut forests… the destroyed kingdoms that had once belonged to her people. She made no public declaration, and she kept her existence as secret as she could while she liberated her elven kin and armed those who were willing to fight. To his pleasure, this was nearly all who beheld her… the freed slaves were only too happy to deify the dark elf as their savior and worship her without reservation. Gradually, she tested humanity’s strength… and as she built up a force of her own to fight them, she found it… wanting.

For the first time in centuries, elves could meet and mate of their own free will. Elf men, when freed and mended, revered Syllia supremely and pledged her their service, and elf maidens honored her, either learning from her what they could of magic or coupling with the few free elf men, thinking to rebuild their race and culture from these scraps. All adored Syllia, but she would take no lover from among her freed brethren — at least, she could not endure a male’s touch. She did allow a few handmaidens to touch her during periods of hiding and rest and integration between attacks, and when she annointed one of her apprentices as a priestess it was always with a kiss and an embrace, but she was unwilling to take a lover of her own. Still, however, she bade all those in her following who could stand to be touched, man and woman, to be fruitful.

None of them knew what kinds of marriage rites and arrangements, if any, the elves of old had practiced. They were rebuilding a culture from whispers, guesses, and lies… but mostly from necessity. They saw the situation with their numbers. In Dunloch, the first town conquered, there had been but two elf males compared with a four dozen elf maidens, from among the latter of whom less than a third showed significant magical or martial talents. Those who would be fit to fight alongside Syllia, with enough training, were taken under her wing as her priestesses and her honor guard, and she instructed these elect talents as a promethean patron, cultivating them into spellswords and battlemages good enough to aid her. Of the remainder, seeing what else was the need of their race and being given the blessing by their savior — who by condoning their proposition consecrated it as new tradition — most decided to serve as the partners and protectors of the precious elf males. Those who were fit to ride and hunt were the guards of the males, and those who lacked such potential dedicated themselves to the males as wives.

If these men died out, so would their race. With the numerical disparity between the sexes, to couple in ostensible monogamy as humans did would cripple any chance for recovery. Those elf maidens who could not serve their people with either sinews or spells instead gave the service of their wombs, and with their understanding of love having been inevitably warped by the situations in which they had lived, they committed themselves to their chosen males as they had once been forced to commit themselves to their masters. The difference was that these were their chosen males… they were under no compulsion but that of their own affection, gratitude, and sense of duty. They cherished the men, loved them, devoted themselves to them, and when a new male came into Syllia’s following he would be likewise inducted, protected, and entrusted with siring the future of their race, provided immediately with plenty of willing caring flesh. They did not differentiate between the various kinds of elves, having no remaining sense of particular elven identities any longer and being too few altogether to be picky, besides. They mated freely… almost promiscuously, reveling in their freedom for the first time in generations.

In this way, her growing nation of freed slaves forged their new traditions and their new identity, shaping practices to suit the needs of their time so that they could survive and bring forth future generations. This was, Syllia guessed, the origin and purpose of all culture. From the deeds of Syllia and her priestesses the Sacred Sisters, they wove new myths and tales of glory, creating what would become the foundations of a new elven pantheon from stories of the greatest among them that would be passed down for generations. Out of necessity they lived as nomads, traveling in the wilderness and taking what they could from human settlements. Few among them had any knowledge of hunting or foraging, but they learned what they could, and they adapted to the best of their ability. When a new town was destroyed, they would take from it spoils to feed their hungry and clothe their naked, and they would integrate the freed elf slaves into this warlike, nomadic, theocratic, and polygamous society, all owing their liberty and their lives to the Savior, Syllia, revering her as their goddess and following her as their queen.

In time, in this way, Syllia came to have an army, her following swollen into a great tribe of Amazonian nomads. She gave them freedom, and she gave them order, and she gave them duty, and she gave them knowledge, and in return they gave her their unquestioning loyalty, love, and worship. Slowly she gathered them and nurtured them… slowly by human reckoning, anyway. To the elves, it was blisteringly quickly… Within two decades after her escape, she had grown her following into an army, a nation of freed slaves ready to conquer their oppressor and reverse history’s wrongs. They would call it justice, even if the motive in their hearts was nearer to bloody vengeance. Still, they grew into a formidable force, and only much too late did the rulers of the human empire come to realize what had happened. By the time the whispered had become something the corrupt aristocracy of the bloated corpse of an empire could no longer ignore, Syllia had already grown too long. They organized their forces and mustered their armies to try and crush this rebellion, and the elves butchered their army like children. The elves, fuelled by hatred and rage and desperate brutality, had cut down all that opposed them, and every mage, every group of mages, that tried to stand against Syllia died in fire and ice and lightning, ripped asunder or their minds cast screaming into the void with their bodies left hollow… and once the mages had been dealt with, the rest of the human army had been little but fodder for Syllia’s might.

Throughout the Empire, terror began to spread. The elves had grown too strong — Syllia had grown too strong — and even the self-important humans had begun to realize that they could not hope to defeat them in open battle. Everyone began to realize that their empire might be doomed, the wealth and priviledge and power their acenstors had secured for them frittered away on hedonism and infighting, and that there was no strength left to opposed vengeance come for them.

Everyone, that is, but the Inquisition.


	4. Dig Two Graves 3 – John Drake's Stories

As Tenielle shivered in the dark, cold cell, she prayed to whichever gods, elf or human, still deigned to listen to the heart of a poor slave girl. ‘Please,’ she begged, her black lips moving in the musty air as she silently mouthed the word. The chains suspending her arms from the ceiling rattled as she moved. ‘Whatever the humans do to me, please, please, please don’t let there be rats…’

The very thought make her brain seize and her heart stop. The last family she’d been enslaved to had kept her in a cellar, where every night she would need to stay awake, listening for the chittering, the pitter patter of those feet and screaming at every rustle in the straw or glint in the shadows. Every time she closed her eyes she could still see her mother’s face as the hateful things burrowed their way into her guts, the way her huge round eyes had bugged from her head, the humans holding her down, her screams echoing in Tenielle’s ears as the starving rats ate her heart…

The cell door creaked open, and Tenielle looked up in fear, recoiling at the presence of the magical ball of light; her eyes had grown accustomed to the darkness. the guards wore the sigil of the inquisition – a cross upon which hung a crucified elf – but they were flanking a dark haired woman with beautiful green eyes… the same woman who had plucked her out of that cellar earlier. She was tall, taller than both the guards and wearing a full suit of armor, and those eyes, though filled with intelligence, were nevertheless hard and glittering with purpose.

“M-m-mistress Elira,” Tenielle bowed her head. “H-how may I serve you?”

“Leave us,” Elira said, removing her armored gauntlets. The two guards bowed and closed the cell door, leaving Tenielle and Elira alone with the ball of magical light.

“Shall I make it brighter?” Elira said, twisting a hand. The glow increased and Tenielle winced and recoiled. “Darker then. My apologies.” She made another gesture and the light dimmed. “I would have thought that after generations, you dark elves would no longer be light sensitive. I suppose helping you get over your weakness was never high on my ancestor’s priorities, though… was it?” She smiled a little, as if she’d just made a joke to herself.

“Thank you my lady,’ Tenielle bowed her head. “You are most gracious.”

“Skin as black as obsidian…” Elira said, leaning in close to inspect Tenielle. “I lived with an dark elf slave once… but she hadn’t been quite as dark skinned as you. I wonder if originally you’re closer to what a Dark Elf was supposed to look like, and she had too much surface elf in her ancestry by then… or if there was just that much variation.” She sighed. “Our texts really don’t say much about it, I’m afraid… not a good state for the curious.” Tenielle wasn’t sure what to say, so she remained silent as Elira turned, dragging a wooden chair over in front of Tenielle. “I understand,” she said as she sat down, beginning to remove her breastplate, “that your family used to have another elf slave.’

“Yes my lady,” said Tenielle. “Yuria.”

“What happened to her?” Elira asked, setting the steel aside and casually continuing to take off her armor. Beneath it, she was wearing a simple cotton tunic and what appeared to be woolen breeches.

Tenielle kept her eyes on the human’s face as she spoke next. “I don’t know, my lady. She was with us for perhaps a decade before she disappeared.”

“Disappeared,” said Elira, smiling. “Convenient.”

“My lady?”

“You and Yuria were kept in separate rooms, am I correct?” she asked as she continued undressing.

“Yes my lady,” Tenielle agreed.

“Why?”

Tenielle swallowed. “…I do not know, My lady.”

“Could you hazard a guess?” Elira asked, smirking as she removed first one armored boot, then the other.

“…our masters did not want us to scheme against them…?”

“Scheme? Interesting. Interesting,” said Elira, sitting back in her chair, fully unarmored, with a sigh of satisfaction. “How very interesting that your first thought is scheming against your masters. Did you do that a lot, Tenielle? Scheme against your masters?”

“No my lady!” Tenielle all but shouted, fear shooting through her. “No, I swear! I was a good elf! Ask them! No trouble at all! None!”

“And yet… Yuria disappeared,” the Inquisitor said softly. “Right around the time the elven rebels were sighted near the city. Are you familiar with the elf slave rebellion?” Elira said, waving her hand idly, causing the magical light to dance and flitter.

Tenielle, for the first time, began to realize it might be wiser not to say anything to this woman. She shut her mouth, and kept it shut. “Ah,” Elira said, her smile growing at Tenielle’s quivering lips. “You’re learning. First time with the inquisition, then?”

“…My lady… Please… I’ve done nothing wrong…” Tenielle sobbed, tears flowing from her black eyes.

“Full black,” Elira noted, peering into her eyes. “Dark on Dark. Syllia didn’t have those. Definitely a half-breed then.”

“I speak truly, my lady!” the dark elf protested. “Torture me all you like. I don’t know where Yuria went. Please, just please let me go…”

“Tenielle,” Elira said, as matter of fact as if she were inquiring about the price of bread. “Did you and Yuria ever make love?”

Tenielle halted in her begging. “…My lady?”

“Did. You ever. Fuck,’ Elira repeated, her chin resting on her hand.

“…Our masters…” Tenielle gulped. “They made us… embrace… sometimes…”

“Embrace!” Elira barked with laughter. “Oh gods, you’ve got to me nearly ten times my age. How are you so innocent?” She got her laughter under control. “What did you ‘embrace’ of her, Tenielle. Tell me.”

“…Her, her b-b-b-reasts…” Tenielle was suddenly aware of how naked she was, swinging from the ceiling, of the glint in Elira’s eyes. “…Her… her lips… her l-lower parts…”

“Which lower parts?” Elira said, her voice huskier than usual.

“H-her… her…”

“You can say ‘cunt,’ Tenielle. Go on.”

“Her c-c-c-unt my lady,” Tenielle whispered.

“Did you lick her?” Elira asked, leaning forward. “Did you eat her little elf cunt while your masters watched?” Tears spilled onto Tenielle’s full, firm breasts, nearly black nipples on black skin, as she nodded. Elira stood, leaning close to her. “Are you good at it?”

“M-my lady?” Tenielle could feel Elira lowering the chains which held her aloft, her feet touching the ground for the first time in… hours? Days?

“How well do you eat cunt, Tenielle?” Elira breathed, her words hot in the elf’s ear as she pushed her shoulders down, forcing the girl to her knees. “I’ve been busy, making plans… and I haven’t had my cunt eaten in a week…”

Tenielle’s shoulders shook as she watched Elira unbutton her breeches, pulling the fabric down to half-thigh. the hair between her legs was dark above soft, puffy folds that ached red with need. As Elira pushed her face down into the musky hair and pale skin, Tenielle reached out with her long, black tongue and heard the human hiss with pleasure as she delved into her wetness.

“Gods, if elf tongue wasn’t designed for exactly this, I can’t imagine what else it was for… I love the way it feels,” Elira moaned as Tenielle ate her, her white fingers curling in the girl’s white hair. “You know Tenielle, I’ve had my cunt eaten by the finest courtesans and whores in all the world. At official events, they send girl after girl to my chambers, trying to woo me, seduce me, get information from me… and I can’t say any of them were less than supremely skilled in the arts of oral pleasure. But – ahh! – none of them, not a single human girl, has managed to beat the feeling of your elf tongue buried in my quim.” Elira stroked Tenielle’s ear. “No wonder you’re entire race was destined to become pleasure slaves. Look at me… I want to see those pretty beautiful eyes…”

Tenielle looked up, and Elira felt arousal shake through her at the sight of the girl’s full black eyes staring up at her while her charcoal lips were kissing her white skin, her dark hair flanked by Elira’s pale thighs…

“Yuria must have had quite the time,” moaned Elira as she rode the girl’s face, pushing the back of her head, forcing her deeper into her folds. “And your masters must have had quite the show if this is your level of – aaahhh – skill…”

Tenielle shut her eyes and focused on her unpleasant task. She was, as she counted, two hundred and eighty seven years old, and never once in that time had she had sex that she enjoyed. She did, however, know how to put – As Elira put it – a show for when they made her lay with Yuria with her mouth, or her fingers, or that wooden thing they often put between her legs. She had had centuries of practice at making it look good, her hands cupping her full breasts, her neck arching, her mouth open, her black tongue wetting her jet lips as she moaned and gasped in exaggerated fashion. It looked good… but she had never experienced joy in it. Not once. As the human Inquisitor came, panting and humping Tenielle’s face, she felt a tiny pang – it would be nice to feel that way, at least once.

“Oh godssss,” moaned Elira as she brought the elf to her feet. “I needed that so badly…” she said before kissing her tenderly, right on the mouth. Tenielle felt the human’s soft lips press against her own wet mouth, tasting her slit of the elf’s mouth as her tongue gently sliding over her skin, and… oh… oh there was something happening… some jolt or another down below…

Tenielle felt herself leaning into the human’s kiss, felt herself open her mouth hungrily, pushing, grasping, desperate. she felt the human tenderly bite her lower lip and Tenielle moaned, really moaned, for the first time in her life. As Elira’s hand clasped her neck and palmed her breast, Tenielle’s head span as she sought any scrap of sensation she could, arching her back, kissing the human, licking her lip, dueling her tongue…

Elira reached between Tenielle’s legs, pushing her fingers inside the girl’s night-black skin. “You’re so slick…” she moaned into the elf’s mouth. “I need to be inside you…”

Tenielle was vaguely aware of a pulsing light emanating from below, and she felt a familiar hardness against her thigh. Looking down, she saw that Elira the Inquisitor’s magic had conjured herself a large, thick shaft. It was far from the first time she had seen a woman do it, but never before had it filled her with anything but dread. Now, in her addled mind, Tenielle felt… almost giddy anticipation. All that was going inside her…?

“My lady…” Tenielle spoke, her voice quavering.

“I’ll be gentle,” promised Elira, nipping her teeth against Tenielle’s neck, causing flutters of prickling skin all the way down to her toes… what was this human doing to her? “You’re so beautiful, Tenielle… has anyone ever told you that?”

Despite herself, Tenielle could feel a blush forming in her cheeks as her loins burned with need for the first time in her centuries of life. Elira was so strong… the muscles of her arm toned and flexing beneath her tunic sleeves as she hoisted Tenielle’s legs, pressing her erection against the elf’s quavering hips. “My lady,” said Tenielle, unable to think of anything else to say. Beautiful? Her? Sexy, yes… whorish, slutty… humans had said those things about her while they ogled her full chest – which Elira was currently suckling – or her lush hips – which Elira’s hands were currently caressing – or her pert, bee-stung lips – which Elira was now kissing, nipping, lashing with her wet, warm, tongue. But beautiful? As Elira’s cock pushed past the exterior of Tenielle’s sex, she felt herself gasping as something completely new filled her – a snickering, tingling sensation that became warmth in her belly and fire in her loins. “M-my lady!” repeated Tenielle as she felt herself filled with more than she had ever felt in her entire life. “My lady! Oh goddess!!!”

“You may call me Elira,” smirked the human as she thrust into the dark elf, smirking. “But if you must say goddess, I suppose I will take that.”

“Elira,” moaned Tenielle as the human fucked her. “Elira, oh gods, yes… more… more… Oh! I’ve never felt… anything like this!”

“First time for everything,’ muttered Elira, still slathering kisses on Tanielle’s neck and chest as she looped the chain around the elf’s neck and pulled, making Tanielle moan and scream at the sensation, pain mixed with erotic ecstasy, the feeling of being filled by Elira’s cock as her head was yanked backwards, steel on her obsidian skin. “Have your masters ever choked you, Tanielle?”

“Not… like… this…” moaned the elf as Elira bounced the girl against her hips, one hand on her ass and the other gripping the chains. “Gods… gods, what is this… I… I…”

“Cum for me Tenielle,” moaned Elira as she thrust into the elf girl, rubbing her dark clitoris, her own small breasts bouncing on her chest as she fucked the elf. “Cum for me…’

Tenielle’s head was yanked backwards as Elira pulled hard on the chains, but the scream from her mouth was pure pleasure. “Aaah! AHHH!!! I’m… I’m cumming!!!”

Tenielle had the first orgasm in her nearly three hundred years of life, screaming and panting and groaning as the wave of impossible ecstasy washed through her. Was that was humans felt every time they fucked her? No wonder they did it so often… by the forgotten gods she felt like every part of her was dying and being reborn all at once… and an explosion of fire in her cunt as Elira came, shooting jet after jet of molten seed into her aching, needy body.

“My lady,” moaned Tenielle, as all too soon Elira pulled away, a beatific smile on her face. “Oh, my lady…” smiled Tenielle. “I’ve… I’ve never felt anything like this in my entire life…”

“I know,” whispered Elira, panting, moaning against Tenielle’s ear. “You really are exceptional, elf… Really good. One of the better lovers I’ve had in my life. Truly.”

“T-thank you my lady…” Tenielle moaned. She felt… odd joy… at having pleasured her lover, like it set fire to her skin. Oh gods, she could live in this moment of pure bliss forever…

“You really don’t know where Yuria is, do you?” Elira whispered into her pointed ear, pausing to nibble on it for a second.

“No, my lady…” Tenielle whispered. Right now, just to stay with her a few more moments, she would have said anything. There was no secret she wouldn’t have shared.

“I didn’t think so. It’s such a shame,” Elira clucked her tongue, her sweat-soaked forehead still pressed against Tenielle’s. “If you did, I could have kept you around for a bit longer while we hunted her down.”

Elira yanked the chain, pulling Tenielle just a few inches upward – enough for her toes to barely touch the cold floor. The dark elf screamed as her body weight began to hang on her throat, desperately trying to push her toes into the stone to prevent her from strangling as Elira looped the chain around the lever, stopping it from falling further.

“My lady!” gasped Tenielle. “Please!”

“I wouldn’t waste that breath,” Elira said, pulling her breeches up and reaching for her armor. “The last girl I did this to took two hours to die, but you look a little lighter than her. Pretty sure you could break that record if you tried.”

Tenielle gasped and danced, her hands still stretched above her head, her toes bruising as they tried to hold all her weight. “Last chance Tenielle,” said Elira, pulling on her breastplate. “yuria. We know she’s with the rebel army. If you tell us where we can find her…”

“My lady…” Tenielle choked out, the chain biting into her neck. “I… I swear…”

Elira sighed, giving the elf one final, loving look as she drank in her black skin, her firm breasts jiggling as she struggled, her pretty face and long legs. “Oh Tenielle,” Elira said. “I wish I could keep you as my pet… such a pretty little thing. So talented too. But… no. It wouldn’t do for the head of the Inquisition to have an elf consort of her own.”

“Please, I’m innocent!” Tenielle gasped. “I don’t know where she is, I don’t, I don’t, I don’t!”

Elira leaned up to kiss the elf’s forehead. “I believe you,” she said softly. “Joseph was innocent, too. Goodbye, lover.” And Elira left the room, bringing the ball of light with her and casting the room into darkness… and no matter how long Tenielle stared at that door, fighting for her life, the door never opened again. She didn’t know how long passed as she struggled for life, fighting for breath as her feet grew weaker and weaker and weaker…

The penultimate thought that went through Tenielle’s head as she strangled in the darkness, choking and rasping on the chain, was that the rippling and undulating and spasming that went through her lower half as her brain slowly shut down… all of that felt suspiciously like an orgasm…

The final thought was ‘at least there were no rats.’

* * *

Elira had made one mistake in her whole life… she hadn’t put that whore in her place when she had a chance.

She had spent her life trying to win her father’s approval… and then he had died. It had taken weeks for news of that to reach her… even though from best guesses she had barely escaped the fate of the Tarn household herself, possibly leaving just hours before the killing had started. Her mother, dead. Her father, dead. Both of those she might have been able to live with, eventually… although finding out how, precisely, her mother had died filled her with rage. But Joseph? He had never hurt anyone… he had been good. He had been kind. He had loved her!

And he had been butchered like a dog so thoroughly that they had to reassemble the bits like a shattered statue.

After that, there really hadn’t been much of a question where she was going. The Inquisition’s primary duties, when they weren’t protecting the weak throne from the machinations of the noble houses, was hunting down runaway slaves… and Syllia’s was one of the bodies they didn’t find. Most thought that the Tarns had been wiped out by a rival house, jealous of how much power they were accumulating towards the Imperial throne. Most thought that Syllia’s body being gone was a sign that the captors had taken the valuable elf slave as their own. Elira wasn’t sure how she knew better, even then… but she had known. Syllia had done this. She didn’t know how, but she knew… and Elira was going to find Syllia if it was the last thing she did, and she was going to repay Joseph’s death with interest.

And now, the Empire was doomed. Elira had been maybe a dozen elf slaves left in the capital in the last month… the rebels had been sneaking into the city, coming up from below and killing everyone in a household, freeing their slaves and taking them with them. Once families had gotten the idea that having a slave in their house was a death sentence, they had nearly-universally given them up, sent them wandering on the streets… where Elira didn’t doubt that most of those had found their way into the rebel army as well. Those that had refused to give up their sex-slaves near-universally met a grisly end. If the Inquisition really wanted to they could perform a census, but Elira felt no need… she was perfect sure that of a population of nearly 50,000 elf slaves in the Empire 20 years ago, there were maybe one or two hundred still in captivity. Those left were free.

To some degree, Elira suspected that the nobles had hoped that with all the slaves free, the killing would stop… that the rebels would take their people and go. She wanted to laugh at their innocence. Blood had been spilled, and by the gallon… this was a war of extinction now, and if they were too stupid to realize it they needed to be moved aside to make room for someone who would do what was necessary. Someone like her. If only they had listened to her sooner. She’d spent years and years trying to convince people that the deaths were the fault of elves… but no one had listened. Hell, people had called her a filthy elf lover and a sympathizer for even thinking they were capable. There would be no more whispers like that soon… Between her family lineage and being proven right, she had been elevated to command of the Inquisition. Now, everyone knew of the gathering army… and when she returned with the head of the rebel leader on a pike then the power of the Inquisition would no longer be behind the scenes. She would take the throne of this defunct empire herself, and she would finish what her ancestors had started and smash these filthy knife-ears into powder.

Rage flooded Elira’s heart. As as nobility, effectively the head of what was left of House Tarn and the head of the inquisition, she had never had the same lover in her bed more than twice, and never in a row. Her life had been filled with a succession of men and women… all doe-eyed, innocent things who wanted her to dominate them, hurt them… but who really just wanted something from her. Power, or information, or loyalty. She longed for more, but… Elira knew, deep in her soul, that she didn’t deserve it. It was that elf whore’s fault. She had raped and tortured dozens of elves in her quest to find Syllia, watching the light leave each of their eyes as she murdered them. The years of lonely searching capped off nearly her entire career of breaking slaves for information, questioning, torturing, extracting. From a captured raider who she had force fed her own womb while fucking her in the bowels, she learned that syllia’s forces slipped into cities via underground tunnels, freeing a slave elf before murdering everyone in the house that had ever abused her and sealing the exit behind them, making it as though they had vanished into thin air, raiding the big cities to add to their armies. From a slave who had endured over thirty twists of the pear inside her pussy before she broke, Elira had learned where the army was camping, hidden magically in the very forests near the capital. From a soldier who had been wounded and captured in the successful assassination of Duke Thelin, though, she had learned the greatest secret of all. With Elira’s cock buried deep in the girl’s brain, the elf had while she screamed out loud the single word that would crush the rebellion once and for all… the name of their goddess.

Syllia.

She had grown strong… absurdly strong. Along among humanity, the Inquisition’s mages still practiced High Magic as a art of war, rather than one of commerce or culture… but even so, her talents had eclipsed there. Elira might be the strongest mage left in the empire, but even if she wasn’t there were no more than a handful as strong as she… and though it galled Elira to admit it, she couldn’t match Syllia’s strength.

But there was more than one way to skin an elf.

Most of the empire was giving into despair, falling deeper into hedonism and living completely in the moment as they enjoyed what they felt would be their last days. Elira was not. How she wished, every single day, she had made a scar on Syllia when her Father had tried to let her… but it was too late for that regret. If she had, then defeating Syllia would be simple. She hadn’t… but it didn’t matter anyway. Elira knew someone else, something unknown to any but a select few… that there had been another of the house of Tarn that’s body had not been found. They still had one hope, at least.

She just needed her baby brother.


	5. Dig Two Graves 4 – John Drake's Stories

Unknown to all but a select few, Elira had not been the only member of house Tarn to survive that night. One other had survived, the man who had seen the very beginning of this second war and vowed in a heart robbed of its innocence to exact his own revenge and right the wrongs that he had seen. In that twenty-year period, where Syllia carried out her guerrilla campaign laying waste to remote towns and villages and bringing together her scattered, captive brethren, the last heir of the house of Tarn had grown and forged himself with a single-minded purpose. He had survived the murder of his family, and he had vowed revenge on the murderer of his house… and with that vow came a conviction to restore the proper order.

Two wrongs did not make a right, and these causes could not be reconciled. Such were the chains wrought by bloodshed and suffering, the fetters of hate constraining souls and fates to a road that could bring only misery and death. This was the nature of the world, and no god or hero could change it.

The boy, Andrew Tarn, had been found by chance. A hunter tracking game near the Tarn estate – a poacher, really – had seen the light show in the manor, and the shouting and loud noises. Curious, he had sneaked close… and he had spied a dark form fleeing through the front gate garbed in aught but rags. A peasant, he had never seen one up close before… but he still recognized an elf when he saw one. Watching one in motion, elves moved nothing like humans. Humans twitched and jerked, sputtered and started, but the dark elf he saw that night flowed like poured water or spilling silk. He considered pegging her with an arrow in the leg and bringing her back to her masters for a reward. Elves were valuable family heirlooms, and if they weren’t kindly treated they were still much coveted. The return of a fleeing elf slave would usually net a fine sum.

But something had stayed the hunter’s hand, causing him to stop halfway from grasping an arrow, and he had kept to the shadows of the trees and let the elf pass. It saved his life… it meant that Syllia didn’t notice him as she vanished into the forest.

Taking a deep breath for a while and shaking off the odd nerves, he noticed eventually that the manor had gone dark and quiet… quiet, but for a single faint sound drifting from a half-open window, a sound that any ear not trained by many years in the wilderness would have missed. But the hunter caught it, and he approached the manor seeking its source. The door was open, and no guards stopped him.

All within were dead, or worse; all, but for a single boy… the last surviving heir of the house of Tarn. Little Andrew was found by the hunter, still sobbing over the tortured, half-naked form of his dead mother, and he was given such succor as a man like this could offer. The poacher listened to what Tarn said, babbling and tearful, of the noises he had heard, and of how he had found his mother lying like this before the slave, Syllia. The boy didn’t understand what had happened. At the time, he didn’t yet comprehend the atrocity that had been visited on him by that fey, vengeful hand. But the hunter understood, and he guessed enough of what had happened… and how fortunate he was to be alive.

“It seems she killed them all,” the hunter told little Andrew. “That dark elf slave of yours.”

“They’re… dead?” the boy repeated, looking into his mother’s blank eyes, seeing her loving countenance disfigured by an incomprehensible torment, seeing an Oathmark etched onto her brow. He understood, and yet he didn’t. But one thing stuck, at least. “She… killed them.”

He thought of the elf, Syllia, his father’s slave. He had never had a strong impression of the creature. He was young, and he had only a vague and extremely inaccurate notion of what it was that Syllia did around the house. But she had been theirs, a part of the household since long before he was born. As far as he knew or cared, she had been one of them. He had considered her a part of the family as much as a boy might consider one of his father’s hounds a part of the family… So he was confused and dismayed to learn of her treachery, as confused as he would have been to hear that his father’s favorite hunting dog had torn out his throat. But amid the confused roil of his emotions, one feeling rose above the rest to give him a sense of clarity, a sense of purpose.

Above sadness, above fear, above everything else rose a hot, swelling anger—hot now as a bonfire newly kindled, burning high and great and horrible in his belly. He was in shock, and he was too young, too weak, too naive to think of revenge in terms of revenge itself. Not that bluntly, nor that soberly. But he hated the elf. He hated Syllia, who had killed his mother and his father, his brothers and his sister, the butlers and the maids and the family’s friends. He was all alone in the world, and everything that had been his reality now lay in ruins, shattered. He was shaken to his core, and he was adrift.

The hunter laid a hand on his shoulder. He was a solitary man, eschewing the company of society for a lonely life in the wilderness, and he was blunt and indelicate, but he attempted to console Andrew the best he could. “Someone will put her down, once she’s found. When they learn she killed her masters, there’ll be a bounty put out, and…”

The look on Andrew’s face stopped the hunter. “Don’t kill her.”

The man faltered, not sure how to take that. “She isn’t safe to keep around, boy. Not if she could kill a whole manor full of people like that. Imperial battlemages will deal with her. They’ll have to put her down and make an example of her. I’m sorry if you’re fond of the creature, but she’s no better than a mad dog, now.”

“No…” Andrew was young, only a child, and he barely understood the weight of what he was saying. But he had nothing left but this one conviction, this one bitter resolution. “I will hurt her. She is mine.”

“You can’t deal with her, boy…” the hunter laughed. “You don’t even come up to my knee.”

But Andrew wouldn’t be persuaded. He was only a child, too young to know what he was committing himself to. But he wouldn’t back down. Even as young as he was, he asserted his rights as Syllia’s last lawful claimant, refusing to hand her to anyone else.

The hunter relented at length, rationalizing it to himself as he did so. “…Fine,” he said at last. “I won’t tell anyone. Maybe she’ll avoid humans and go into the wild. But if she does, you’ll never find her again. Not unless you were an even finer tracker than me.”

“Then teach me to find her,” Andrew said. “Teach me to be a better tracker than you.”

The hunter could have refused. He could have dismissed this, brought Andrew to a trustworthy caretaker, and gone back on his word and told the authorities. But something in the lad’s eyes struck a chord in the hunter, and he nodded.

He was detached enough from society to feel no special responsibility to report the incident. Surely someone else would see her before long, and she would be caught and collared and interrogated… Long before the boy could ever dream of confronting the elf, he was sure, she would be found and dealt with, whether or not she was reported. Hell, it was as likely as not that she would get lost and starve in the wild. Elf or not, she was a slave with no survival skills and likely enough no knowledge of the outside world. Even if she had been able to kill the inhabitants of the manor, even if she had seemingly done so with powerful magic, that didn’t mean she would know how to feed herself or how to find her way in the trackless wilderness.

And the hunter understood far better than most how likely it was for the elf to meet such an end. So, no, despite his initial inclinations, he was not bothered about not reporting the elf, and he wasn’t unwilling to humor the lad’s request. He was a loner and a little dishonest, and he didn’t want to explain to authorities what he had been doing on the Tarn family’s estate that brought him to discover little Andrew. He would rather not be forced to confess to poaching game on the Tarn family’s land. Also… he was simply moved by that look in the lad’s eye. He liked that look, and he figured that the boy wouldn’t have anywhere else to go.

So the hunter took Andrew under his wing, and for the next seven years, he taught Andrew everything he knew. The boy grew quickly, and by his tenth birthday he had surpassed the hunter in his craft. Andrew had kept an ear open in all that time, ever listening for news of Syllia. The years only hardened him in his resolve to punish her, and the more time that passed without news of her capture – for that would surely have been a story worth telling far and wide, once she was made to disclose the means of her escape – the more he was convinced that he would be the only one able to bring her in. But the hunter always dismissed him when he brought it up, the old man convinced that the elf had died in the wilderness long ago.

But when Andrew turned twelve, they made what should have been a routine, semi-monthly stop in the village of Byway, only to find it empty. Empty, that was, of living men. The dead, however, were plentiful, bloated and moldering and ridden with maggots. Some looked to have been gnawed upon by scavenging beasts, and others had a look of being carved up and dined on by less animal predators. There were no livestock, but many bones, and signs of feast and slaughter and orgies macabre. The village had been small, with less than fifty inhabitants, and it was out of the way. Andrew and the hunter were perhaps the first to discover what had happened to Byway. And they had no evidence of what had **definitely** happened, only suspicions.

But Andrew was sure.

The hunter dismissed it as the work of bandits, albeit it a touch hesitantly when he looked upon some of the signs of worse savagery — the remnants of cruelties far beyond the malice of any mere brigand. He was especially disturbed by the sight of seven decaying men hung from the branches of the highest tree, riddled with arrows like they had been used for target practice, and by the remains of three naked young maidens lying in the center of the village with horseshoe nails rammed through through feet. The nails had partly fused with the bones of their heels, suggesting that they had been compelled to dance with the red-hot nails jammed into their soles until they died. Most of the dead men looked to have been castrated, either while they were still alive or shortly after death. It was a brutal, ghastly scene, and they had to have been the first to discover it. If anyone else had come across it, they would have certainly heard report before now of the atrocities visited upon Bywater by its unknown assailants. The bodies would have buried, at the very least.

The old man was shaken by what they found, and when Andrew voiced his suspicion that it was the work of his family’s escaped slave, the hunter dismissed it at once. Not now, perhaps, because he believed it impossible, but because he did not want to accept responsibility for having not reported her years ago. He insisted that Syllia was dead, that it had to have been the work of bandits or raiders, and that they could not have done anything to stop it. But Andrew was unconvinced, and it wasn’t much longer before he parted ways with the old man.

He had learned all that he could in the hunter’s company, and while he was grateful for how the man had looked after him, he knew that he would need to learn more and get stronger if he wanted to stop Syllia. So Andrew wandered the countryside for the next seven years, learning what skills he could, gaining what experience was within his reach, and he kept an eye out for news of more occurrences like the rape of Bywater. He learned of the mysterious fate of the village of Dunloch, and he heard of similar incidents at Graymont, Highwater, Southing, and Bitter Creek.

Solitude hardened Andrew, and learning of the mysterious atrocities that had befallen those remote villages, he grew cold and distant. He grew to manhood and knew various maidens, a hard life leaving him aloof and enigmatic, dark and intense. He experienced the pleasures of the flesh and the anguish of the heart. At times he sought solace in a woman’s arms only to find it inadequate, too tepid and too shallow to make him forget, and at other times he was beseeched and implored to stay by some lusty maid who had been smitten by his grim appearance and his purposeful stride.

And through it all, his hatred grew.

It was the elves fault the world was like this, he knew. He passed more than one desperate whore, forced to make do with scraps. All those rich enough to pay one had an elf. All those that that could not buy an elf barely had enough to pay the desperate. Whores in this kingdom were lean, desperate things… and she had seen more than whom had needed to allow men to do horrible, disfiguring things to her in order to eat that week. The elves were demons, succubi from hell temping good men into evil… they were a blight on the world.

They had to be destroyed.

At the end of those seven years of errantry, Andrew was a man. Hearkening to the news of increasing incidents and disappearances in the wilderness, of more villages and small towns being found ruined and ransacked, he set out on the trail of his quarry. But it was a long and treacherous road, and he could not walk its full length unsupported. Yet there were those who took note of the tales of a grim, gray-eyed young man wandering the outskirts of the empire. One woman noticed the rumors of increasingly savage rape and pillaging.

The empire was vast, and its centers of power were yet oblivious to the deeds going on in the boondocks. It was old and tired and corrupt, its armies rusty and shrunken, its officers lazy and fat. Few were competent, and still fewer were diligent, but eventually this dull, ponderous, weathered behemoth began to suspect that something was happening. A decade and a half after Syllia’s flight, it finally came to the attention of the imperial court that there was something strange afoot. But even then, there was much doubt, much skepticism, and few were willing to consider the worst possibilities. Many dismissed it, and some outright denied it, but a canny, ambitious few were more insightful, more credulous.

And Elira sought out the young vagrant, the man who claimed to be her half brother and the scion of the house of Tarn.

Elira listened to Andrew’s tale, and in his account knew the truth of his words… he was her half brother. There was a lethal threat growing in the core of the empire. The Inquisition was interested in his tale. It didn’t not matter to most of them how many villages had been destroyed, except in how it increased the credibility of this threat, and they did not care how many people had died, except that it would make Syllia’s defeat that much more worthy of reward. They were cold, cynical, ambitious… and in Elira, Andrew found someone who’s hatred for Syllia matched his own. If it was true that this was all being done by the same elf slave that had murdered his family — and as the months passed, more tales came to their ears that seemingly testified to Andrew’s account and vindicated his long-held suspicions — then he would be the one most perfectly positioned to end it. And with each year that passed, it became more certain. Before long, Syllia proclaimed her open defiance to the empire, and she and her army made their existence known, taking one of the great old fortresses from the time of the war and butchering its garrison.

His half sister gave him the support of the Inquisition. They have him food and shelter. They train him to fight, to sneak, to kill. And passed from their father’s mouth to Elira’s ears and now to Andrew, Elira gave him the most critical secret she possessed… Syllia’s Oathword, the the magical word that only he trigger. One day at a time, Elira groomed him to become the bane of the elf leader.

The attacks were swift, coordinated perfectly and prepared for many years in advance. With all the fierce desperation of a slave revolt and the slow-building stratagems of the old elven generals, gathering secret momentum for decades before unleashing a swift, irresistible onslaught, Syllia’s forces made their opposition to the empire plain. Nineteen years after her escape, it became clear that Syllia had grown to be a potentially existential threat to the empire, and already she was aiming for the throat. Her forces grew with every conquest, taking in the captive elves and fostering in them a fervor of purpose, a fanatical devotion to Syllia. She could not erase their Oathmarks, but by all reports she was rewriting them to become their sole keeper, protecting her followers from recapture.

Andrew’s patrons saw as things became more dire, and over the next two years they taught him and prepared him while the empire’s forces suffered one defeat after another. What armies humanity had were small and scattered, and they could not muster enough strength to crush the elves. Not quick enough. If they’d been aware sooner, maybe… but the ruling class had missed the signs, or ignored them, until it was much too late, and now they paid the price for their complacency. Soon, it became clear that if Syllia was not stopped, the empire would fall, and humanity would suffer far worse retribution than it had dealt to the elves so many centuries ago.

Andrew knew the truth of it… he had seen it that night with his own eyes, could see it in his minds eye each time he closed his eyes and tried to sleep. Syllia would not leave humans alive as a slave race. She would not give them the chance she had been given. She was merciless, and she was unstoppable. The elves now were not as the elves of old. Their culture had been erased, and they had not the lore or the civilizing pride of their ancient societies. No morality had been instilled into them but that of fear and pain, domination and submission, and they had no reason to be merciful, no reason to value mercy or extend it to the horrible Other that had subjugated and tormented them for centuries. Stripped of their old religions and cultures and enflamed by Syllia’s relentless drive for vengeance, they were as barbarians, tribally egoistic and capricious, exacting cruel retribution without any moderating influence of higher moral teachings.

They would not stop unless they were stopped by another. They had no law but reverence for their savior, and fealty to her. On some level, Andrew understood the irony. In humanity’s contempt, their masters had reduced them to the level of beasts, and as beasts now they were – savage and relentless, filling their foes with dread.

But he would not fear them. There was still one who could overthrow them and bring them back to heel. As he saw it, this was only just. To Andrew, it seemed clear that elves did not deserve freedom. He did not fear them, and he did not pity them.

He only hated them, and most of all he hated their so-called goddess.

He was mankind’s last champion, and none but his patrons even knew who he was. Syllia had only one weakness, one unclosable seem in her armor. And through that weakness, she was the weakness of all her army. Her Oathmark alone, she could not rewrite… and so she alone could still be reclaimed by a master of the bloodline who held the right to her Oathword. Andrew was the last of the house of Tarn, the last to hold the right to claim her, and through her, he could subdue her entire army.

On the twenty-sixth year after Syllia’s escape, seven years by seven years by seven years since Andrew was orphaned, he made his way into the camp of the enemy, who journeyed to take capital and conquer the empire.

If he failed, it would be the end for humanity. If he succeeded, elves would never again have the chance to overthrow their masters. There would be no peaceful reconciliation. There could be no forgiveness or atonement.

There was only fear and hate, only subjugation or destruction. One would rise, the other would fall.

No other outcome was possible.


	6. Dig Two Graves 5 – John Drake's Stories

Andrew had spent nearly a year finding a way into the elven warcamp… including a month hiding in a cave barely larger than he was, lying alone in his own shit as he waited and observed, waiting for a weak spot in their patrols and magical defenses… but finally he was here. With a hunter’s stealth, light-footed and wary, Andrew flitted from shadow to shadow. Trained as a trapper, a poacher, a tracker, he made his way unseen and unheard through the elven camp. Tents of a crude fashion were clustered around the heart of the camp, tarps stitched together from the hides of ownerless cattle, draped with fabrics stolen from the bodies of their former masters. Some tents had human skulls hanging over their entrances, and from some hung the bones of children in barbarous chimes. There was no unifying style of adornment, no coherent fashion to the structure and arrangement. Only brute practicality and a grotesque, childlike sense of style, gaudy, chaotic, and morbid.

Andrew marked out most keenly those suggestions of barbarity and degeneracy, affirming himself in the hardened, unyielding vendetta he had against these creatures and their mistress and latching onto every sign of cruelty and depravity. He was careful as he made his way through the camp, fixing himself on his destination and betraying no signs of his presence, but he kept his hatred burning… he had no respect for them except that of a hunter for his prey. Still, he appreciated that they were dangerous, and he understood that if he failed, he would suffer a certain and terrible death. He had spent nearly his whole life preparing for this moment, and he wouldn’t let himself fail now.

From some tents, larger and more finely adorned, he could hear the squalling of elven young, the first generation born outside slavery in so many centuries – too precious to leave unguarded, even in a guarded warcamp. From other tents he heard the soft sighing of lovers intertwined in private confidence, soldiers joining in sapphic couples or harems attending to the fathers of their future race and breeding a generation of elves who, if their campaigns succeeded, would know only freedom and mastery of the earth, unquestioned and unrivaled. Here he heard friends sharing their doubts and their hopes as they drifted off to sleep, and there he saw priestesses comforting their flock with evening prayers.

They were almost like people.

Andrew shook his head. He had almost felt a twinge of sympathy, seeing them as they were among their own kind, showing softness and kindness and a nearly human camaraderie. But this likeness to mankind only deepened the uncanniness of the differences, and it made still more jarring and detestable the more savage adornments and the more gruesome trophies of their twenty-year campaign against the empire. If they found him, they would do to him as Syllia had done to his family, as she had done to the people of Dunloch and Byway, of Graymont, Highwater, Southing, and Bitter Creek, and of dozens more towns and villages on the outskirts of the empire, in the wake of their campaign into the heartland and toward the capital.

He was moved… but not to compassion. Seeing the camp and its inhabitants only hardened his resolve, by momentarily shaking his certainty ultimately only making it stiffer. And so he made his way to the center of the camp, evading detection by the guards, slipping past all watching eyes and deceiving all listening ears. As silent as a whisper, like no more than a ghost, he crept slowly and steadily toward the greatest tent at the center of the camp, the tabernacle to the elven goddess of knowledge and liberation, Syllia, bringer of magic and bane of men.

They adored her and revered her as the judge of fate, the righter of wrongs and defender of the oppressed. She was their savior, and they would do anything she bade them to do. And if Andrew had his way, she would be their undoing.

* * *

He watched, hidden in the shadows, as Syllia embraced one of her priestesses… the an elf from the very first town she had freed, turned into one of her Sacred Sisters. He watched Syllia as she kissed the forehead of the elf she called Laoyre, the two of them embracing, the dark goddess comforting her follower before sending her on her way. He could hear them whispering to each other… could just barely hear the whisper as Laoyre spoke into her goddess’ ear. “You give my life purpose.”

Then she was gone… and there was no more reason to stall. He stepped out in front of Syllia, eyes narrow.

In the process, it had felt felt arduous and difficult, roundabout a vague… but once he reached his goal and stood before her, watching her dark eyes widen, the path that had led him here seemed straight and sure. Once he was at the finish line, it amazed him to realize how easy it seemed. He had prepared for this moment for twenty years, and now that she was in his hands, he knew that he had achieved his goal. He saw the terror in her eyes. He saw her freeze up as he drew breath, as he opened his mouth to speak.

“I hate you.”

He had meant to invoke the Oathword, but this intonation seemed to paralyze her every bit as tightly as any binding magic. He gripped her tighter, staring into her eyes, looking at her dark face and her graceful features, a lithe and womanly form clad in fine and flattering vestments. The robes of her status were revealing, their fashion informed by the kinds of clothes the elves had been made accustomed to wear, so used to nakedness and the scantiest rags that anything more concealing than this felt oppressive and confining. Gazing down at the expanse of her breasts, nearly on display, he felt a desire more intense than any he had ever before felt stir in his loins. He saw a taut belly, waist trim, hips wide, legs long and slender. High was the slit in her skirts, and low plunged her neckline, and her belly and her back were left uncovered. Tighter still he held her, pushed against the floor of her makeshift temple, and lower and more harshly, he growled. “I’m going to make you pay. I’m going to end this.”

Andrew glared at Syllia as he seized her robes and rent them with his hands, as he threw her down powerless beneath him, fixing her with his eyes and holding her motionless with the weight of her shock and her fear. Noiselessly her mouth worked open and closed, and she whimpered beneath the man, recalling everything that had led to this point, remembering all that she had done to free her people, to avenge her race and punish mankind. She had come so far, and it seemed like now it was all for naught. She barely had the will to stir her fingers or give voice to her breath, too stunned and too afraid to invoke the powers that could free her. Fear made her helpless, fear and doubt and a trace of regret.

But she was naked now, and he was upon her. She could feel his strength and his hardness, and she shuddered at the touch of his skin. It was a familiar thing… loathsomely so. How many times had she lain like this beneath a man with those eyes, a man with that jaw? Andrew was a true son of the Tarn bloodline, the heir of her masters and the lawful owner of her body. It was like waking from a dream, the last 20 years of freedom vanishing like a popped soap bubble. She had come so far since her first and greatest rebellion, when she had murdered all the members of that house and freed herself from their cursed command… but she hadn’t freed herself after all, for she had faltered at the last. In fear or mercy or exhaustion, she had spared this man and left. He had only been a boy then, maybe, barely more than a toddler, but she had spared him, and ever since then, she had feared him.

In the last twenty years, she had done nothing but flee the thought of him, the gnawing doubt and the lurking fear. Somewhere deep down, she had known this day would come. But she hadn’t been willing to accept it. She had run from the truth, comforting herself by saying that of course he must have died, left alone and helpless in that great, empty manor, and she had not prepared herself for this as he had prepared himself.

Any other, she could have faced without fear and struck down, unflinching. The emperor, the greatest of humanity’s high battlemages, the head of their Inquisition, all the armies of mankind united… she could have defied them without fear and humbled them with her power. Andrew alone could inspire this dread, Andrew alone, whom she had pitied and spared, the one moment of softness in two decades of campaigning, the one real mistake in almost two centuries of plotting.

It was like… Her heart was naked before him, and her fear was open in her eyes, wide and staring as he thrust into her. Her mouth gaped wide open, jaw straining from the girth of an agonized scream that rose from her belly, but the wail could not sound itself before his hand clamped down over her mouth, stifling her voice and muffling her howls. And he thrust in and out of her, moving his hips powerfully, manfully, fucking Syllia with a strength and a ferocity that frightened her.

“If you say a word, I will have but one Word for you,” he said darkly, eyes flitting to the Oathmark on her brow. Syllia’s insides twisted, and she whimpered into his palm. In and out, in and out. He fucked her, a toned and wiry frame heaving above her, lean from a hard youth but robust with an active muscularity. He was like his ancestors, yet so much unlike them. “Submit to me, Syllia,” he growled. “Submit, or I will do to you what you did to my family.”

Even in her fear, Syllia guessed that he was bluffing. In her heart, she knew it was probably too late for that. Her following was now too large and too fanatical to be stopped simply by killing her. To the contrary, her martyrdom would surely propel them into an even greater hatred of humanity, lending to their new cultural narrative that perfect instant of tragedy to cement the existence of the elven identity and perfectly justify their revenge. There could not be a more disastrous mistake for humanity than to try and simply kill her, and she was certain that Andrew realized this. She could read the lie in his stare, as she could once read the lies in the faces of her long late masters.

But Andrew was as much unlike his forebears as he was like them. It was not a difference in nature, but in the expression as it was shaped by his experience. Her masters before him had been pampered and comfortable, only as fit as they chose to be for their leisurely pursuits, well-fed and lounging with the ease of nobility. He had the same blood, the same eyes, the same bones and sinews as his fathers, but he had not the softening reserves of fat in his cheeks, not that touch of relative limpness in his wrist. He was not a spoiled dandy, but a man who had suffered and striven and survived by his own ability, living in the wild and wandering the lands. He was worldlier than his forebears, sterner and steelier. Maybe this was the quality that had shown in his ancestors who fought during the war, of whom their descendants had told so many proud stories. He looked like a vagabond, but he held himself like a warrior, and he had a discipline and cultivated technique surpassing anything in the possession of her own troops, fortified as well by just as much experience as any of them had. He was a fighter. He was a killer. He was a survivor.

There was a skill to his movements like Syllia had never felt from the movements of his ancestors. He had both a firmness far surpassing them and experience to rival them, in his travels having known many fleeting lovers. As well, there was a ferocity unlike even the cruelest brutalities of his forebears, not just a viciousness of spite or savagery to amuse himself, but a deep, visceral, emotional violence that drove his hips and smoldered in his eyes. His every touch was an attack on her body, and she could not defend against him.

Tears slid down from her black eyes. It had been twenty years since Syllia last knew a man’s touch. Loathing her experiences in the service of the Tarn family, and partly wishing also not to complicate the affairs of her followers, she had not embraced a man since the night she murdered her masters, and she had not known this sensation of raw, heated, pulsating fullness in all those years. She had never liked it back then. She had never believed that she could ever even tolerate it. But… it was perversely pleasurable, and if her mind and heart despised this touch, her body craved it and relished it.

This embrace satisfied something inside Syllia even as it horrified her. Something visceral, programmed into her by three hundred years of abuse and conditioning, responded to Andrew’s touch, woman’s flesh delighting in the feel of a man’s cock with no concern for learned moral revulsion. No, the very hate and fear that she felt for Andrew made the sensations seem that much more intense, stoking the flames of a treacherous passion, a humiliating longing that she wished she could tear out from her soul and fling over the horizon. But this was part of her, and she could not remove it, and she could not deny it, even if she had chosen to walk a path in rejection and defiance. She had hated her masters, and she had feared them, and she feared and hated Andrew even more.

But he was different from them. He had known suffering, and he had lived a hard life. This did not make him kinder, and it clearly did not make him care for her, but…

Syllia moaned.

She hated it she hated it she hated it. It was not a moan of pain, nor of disgust. Her back arched, her body twisting exquisitely beneath Andrew’s inexhaustibly bucking frame, their skin clapping together and their sweat mingling between their naked forms. She felt his cock inside her, and she marveled at how huge and solid it felt, long and thick and unyieldingly hard. Had his sires had dicks like these and she’d simply forgotten, or was he a rare prodigy in his bloodline? Whichever was the case, Syllia reveled in it, closing her eyes as she felt herself be used. Almost, she forgot herself. Almost she regressed to that shameful period between her fearful youth and her bitterly plotting womanhood, almost returning to that time of slavish submission before the full resolve had blossomed and she had begun planning her revenge. He was doing things to her that she had never felt before, and he was making her feel things that terrified and delighted her. The very ferocity of his ravishing made it more delightful, and she drowned in his touch as she was filled by his cock.

Their bodies thumped meatily together, her ass slapping the dirt, her breasts jolting and swaying as their frames rocked together. She was moving reflexively with him, turning her hips upward, wheeling her loins to grind her sex on his pumping rod. His cock sawed inside her sex, and his hands grasped at her body and squeezed her brusquely, and his eyes held her with a dark and furious look that laid Syllia shamefully low. Drool shone on her lips, trickling down to her chin. Her heart raced in her bosom, and her pupils vanished behind fluttering lids. She moaned louder, yielding more to the man’s touch, succumbing more to his gaze, feeling herself spasm and tense from his fierce, powerful thrusts.

“No…” she gasped through his fingers. “I can’t…”

“Submit!” he commanded. “You are mine! You have always been mine!”

Something about his face, something about his eyes, something about his tone made this statement seem… delightful? No, not delightful… simply correct. She should have resented it. She should have rejected it. But she thrilled, and she gazed at him, vulnerable, powerless, humbled and humiliated.

She almost wanted to submit to him. It was insane, but… in his arms, she felt no fear. She was afraid of him, yet his embrace in some way made her feel happy. It was a hollow happiness, and obliteration of the soul and self, but… it was like the worst had already happened. There was nothing to fear any longer. Nothing to dread. A strange emotional burden lifted off of her while she was helpless and defeated.

Why…? Why? Why was she like this? Why was she allowing herself to…?

“I… hate you,” she whimpered. “You… Your family… everything that you have done to my people…!”

“I hate YOU,” Andrew replied, thrusting faster, thrusting harder. His hand left her mouth and drifted down to her neck, his fingers brushing her throat. “After everything you have done to me, and to my people… I can never forgive you!”

Syllia shivered. Her hips bucked, and she gnashed her teeth. “I hate you,” she moaned, squeezing her eyes shut. “I hate you…!”

Andrew closed his hand over her throat. He squeezed, choking her, thrusting harder and smacking her hip. Syllia’s eyes bulged, and more spit leaked from her mouth, a moist sheen glazing her chin while her frame bucked and lurched beneath Andrew. She stared at him, fascinated and afraid, feeling him rape her, feeling him choke her, feeling him glare at her and knowing how he wanted to destroy her and everything she had created.

She couldn’t speak. She gurgled. She groaned. She shivered, wondering if he really would kill her, after all. Despite her previous conviction, she feared how far his anger could push him. There was no certainty. Anything was possible. He could do anything to her, and she could do nothing to stop him.

He held her while he choked her, and he moved his lips while he raped her. Syllia recognized the impending syllables from the first shape his mouth made, and she heard the word in her mind, echoing from three hundred years of memory, before he even gave the first whisper of breath to the word. “Itharien.”

Her Oathmark kindled. Magic that had lain dormant for two decades reawakened at its rightful master’s command and curling the tendrils of arcane power that intertwined with her deepest essence, like a pulsating parasite that spread roots through all her flesh and lit itself in a sudden phoenix blaze, electrifying her body and burning her spirit to ash. Syllia would have screamed, but he squeezed her throat even tighter, and no sound but a weak choking could leave her mouth. Her eyes bulged and rolled wildly in her sockets, her body seizing, her limbs madly thrashing. Yet, even if she was magically powerful, physically she could not match Andrew – all the involuntary thrashing of her excruciating seizure could do nothing more to help her escape him than her conscious efforts could.

Andrew did not stop thrusting as the Oathmark’s magic seared its way through Syllia’s veins. If anything, his thrusting reached its crescendo as she was racked by the runic powers that he had invoked, Andrew raped Syllia more fiercely still as she was trapped in the throes of perfect anguish, fucking her more viciously as she choked and writhed and soundlessly sobbed, tears streaming down her cheeks as pain and pain and pain vanquished all reason from her eyes.

The magic obliterated her, and it dominated her, and it forced her submission as irresistibly as divine command. She was undone by it, rent to pieces and left gaping wide, open and vulnerable and emptied of will. On reflex she nullified herself, blanking out her mind and deadening her wits, limply receiving this familiar torment and waiting for it to end. She let it wash over her. She let it erode her. If she resisted, she would shatter. If she fought it, she would be destroyed.

But the pain was not the only thing that she felt, and she could not utterly banish her awareness while her master’s cock was still thrusting in and out of her. No, she felt his manhood plundering her sex, honoring her with the touch of his naked flesh, and something in her responded to it. The torment of the Oathmark, the terror of the Oathword… she had been fleeing these things for twenty years, but she was in their grip once more, and she had been claimed by her lawful owner. There was nowhere to run, nothing more to fear, and that was… freeing. As liberating in an odd way as her first steps outside of the mansion she had grown up in.

She was an object, of course. A thing, less than even an animal. She was not a person. She had no moral worth, no rights or privileges, and no responsibilities either — none, that was, except to satisfy her master. And for that, she had to do no more than lie back and let him have her however he wished. Yes, she just had to let her master have his fun. She just had to wait for her master to finish. She ought to be grateful that her master had come all this way to reclaim her. She should be flattered that he still wanted to take her back, and not just discard her and replace her with a more obedient slave.

Her mind was scrambled, her thoughts disordered. Between the twin assaults of pleasure and pain, racked by the Oathmark and ravaged by her master’s cock, Syllia could not think. She forgot herself. She forgot her ambitions. She forgot her people and her obligation to them. Really… what were elves, anyway? Just a lot of knife-eared fucktoys. They were slaves. They were meat. They existed to be used by their masters. They had been born to be used. They deserved to be used. They deserved to be broken and discarded and replaced. They were worthless. They were expendable. Every moment of use, every second of attention from their masters, was an incalculable, incomparable blessing.

In that moment, Syllia was happy. There was no anger. No hatred. No bitter resolve. She was freed from the responsibilities she had so rashly taken on, relieved of the duties that weighed so heavily on her shoulders. She no longer had to keep worrying about the future of her people. She no longer had to bother about leading them to victory. It had all been a mistake, a foolish lark… She should have known better than to think she could defeat her master, than to think that elves could ever be anything but slaves and pets and pieces of meat.

Syllia smiled in the agony as her head swam from want of air, as the throbbing and searing and crackling of the Oathmark worked its way deeper and deeper into her soul, the anguish eating her personality alive. Every inch of her was on fire, writhing in an agony worse than hell, yet she was blissful, absorbed in the feeling of her master’s cock plunging in and out of her, attending euphorically to the throb of his erection, to the spasm of his rod, to the spurt and gush of his cum as it shot into her pussy.

He came inside her, and she came for him in gladness at receiving his seed. A training that she had for so long defied and subverted was now by Andrew’s hands completed, perfected, and she became in truth was she had for two centuries feigned to be – the perfect, submissive slave. She was his slave. She was his pet. She lived for him. She would die for him. She wanted to serve him. She had no purpose but his pleasure, and if he tired of her, she would accept death without complaint. She was his plaything, and once he no longer enjoyed using her, it would only be natural for him to get rid of her or kill her.

Syllia smiled until her jaw hurt, smiling until her face was sore, smiling in a lunatic rictus as she was conquered by the Oathmark’s magic and her master’s cock. Maybe somewhere deep down there was still a remnant of her hate, and maybe once the spell was lifted, she would remember herself, but in this moment, she was nothing other than his dutiful, mewling thrall, and Andrew could see it.

He pulled out of Syllia with a grunt, looking down at her naked body. The Oathmark was still active, sparking and glowing on her brow, sending fiery script like a runic infection throughout her skin, wrapping around her body like the coils of a snake. She was writhing and moaning and vapidly, shamefully smiling, mindlessly reverencing him with glassy, punch-drunk eyes.

“Your army…” Andrew said, rolling Syllia onto her belly, plastering her tits on the mat beneath her and straddling her from behind. “Disband it. Restore your followers to their proper state, and return them to their masters. Invoke their Oathmarks, and I will release yours and give you what you want.”

Somewhere inside her tortured, frazzled, dizzied head, Syllia managed to have a thought. She brushed a hand over her throat. She hadn’t even noticed when Andrew had stopped choking her, and she felt a little disappointed that he hadn’t gone farther.

Maybe there was still a vestige of sanity in her mind, and maybe she could have defied him at the last. She could have refused, and suffered the Oathmark’s torment until she perished, dying as his mother had died — as her mother, too, had died. She could have accepted death and become a martyr for her race. She could have tested Andrew and seen how far he was willing to push it, daring him to cross the line and doom his people with a careless stroke.

But she was… so… tired.

Tired as she had not felt since the night that she slaughtered the Tarn family. Tired as she had not felt since the moment she spared that weeping child and left him beside his lifeless mother. That child was now a man, and he had come to assert over her all the power that his house had ever held over her, over her mother, and over her mother’s mother. She was his slave, and she had never been anything else.

And she never would be.

Syllia whispered the Oathword that she had set to the marks of all her followers, a Word that she alone had the right to speak with power. From any other lips it would mean nothing and do nothing. To someone without her magic, it would have also done nothing without their ability to hear it. It was neither of those things. From her, it was the doom of her race, the undoing of her campaign, and the damnation of her soul. She sent the magic throughout her camp, a wave of force that washed over all the escaped slaves of her race, be they soldiers or priestesses or mothers and fathers. Male and female, strong and weak, shrewd and simple — there were none who could escape the invocation, and like a ghastly chorus, their screams arose throughout the camp all at once as they fell powerless, bound once more by that familiar power, racked by that hated torment.

It was finally over.

Andrew smacked Syllia’s ass, hearing the proof that she had done as he bade her, spanking the elf like it was her reward, and he grabbed her by the hair and bent over her, biting her long, pointed ear and whispering her Oathword so that his voice tickled her lobe.

All at once, Syllia was relieved of her torment, and she slumped in a sweaty heap beneath Andrew. The end of the pain did not bring her sobriety, nor did it make her immediately regret what she had done. She was still awash with many sensations, profoundly weak and dully happy. She was relieved that the Oathmark’s torture had been lifted, even if the price of that relief was to condemn all the rest of her people back to slavery or worse, and she sighed and squirmed beneath her master, feeling the head of his cock nestle promisingly, menacingly between her dark, round buttocks.

“Fuck me, Master…” she said, her words moaned without shame, without honor, without pride. “Choke me. Break me… Kill me.”

She felt the first twinge of regret as she said this, and the weight of what she had done began to settle on her heart. Despite the momentary sense of relief, a pit opened in her stomach, and she shuddered in the first rush of horror as the screams grew louder and more numerous, even the strongest willed of her followers soon succumbing to the agony of the Oathmark. But she did not speak the word that would end their pain and free them from this binding magic.

There would have been no point.

It was no longer in her power to relieve them of that pain. The Oathmark took possession of everything in its bearer and turned it against them, relinquishing all to the master of the Oathword. That included the magic of other Oathmarks bonded to the bearer. By invoking the Oathword while her own Mark was active, she had surrendered the Word to her master. He was their rightful owner now, as far their marks were concerned. Unless he permitted her to use the Oathword again, she would not be able to turn the Marks of her followers on or off. In her weakness, in her fear, in her madness, she had doomed her people.

Faintly, Syllia could hear the sounding of trumpets, the trampling of hooves. The cries that arose from the camp were the signal Andrew’s allies had been waiting for, and the personal troops of the imperial nobles who had lent him their aid now descended on the helpless elves. Before the night was through, they would all be back in bondage, returned to slavery and forced to accept it for good… if they were lucky.

Syllia understood what was going to happen, and she despaired deep down. Out of this despair, she buried herself again in the deadening, mindless lasciviousness that had overthrown her at the cusp of victory, hoping to find some meager solace in the very weakness that had destroyed her.

“Break me, Master,” she repeated, in a way almost seeing it as atonement, as an escape from the responsibility for what she had done. She wanted to be beaten down until she didn’t have any hope or desire anymore… nothing to disappoint. Nothing to recognize her failure. She thought fleetingly of all the humans who had perished at the hands of her followers, slain out of hatred — maybe a just hatred from their perspective, but surely not from that of the humans — and wondered how harsh the retribution for their vengeance would be. Too late, she saw the cycle that she had perpetuated, and she despaired of any escape but death from the ever-turning wheel of fate. “Punish me, Master…”

There was a sob in her voice, and tears burned in her eyes. She was miserable. She was furious with herself.

Yet, at the same time…

Syllia’s heart skipped a beat when Andrew’s fingers curled around her throat. Her hips bucked, her pussy clenching, when Andrew drove his hips down and thrust his cock into her ass. She felt faint as he squeezed, and she felt giddy as he thrust, and beneath his firm body, she could almost forget everything that had happened. There was just her and her master, just his hands throttling her throat and his cock reaming her ass, and if she closed her eyes, she could almost pretend that none of this had ever happened, that it had all been a dream and she was still a faithful, dutiful slave of the house of Tarn…

But she knew this wasn’t the case, and her surrender could not blind her to reality. Deep down, she was still aware of her failure, of her twofold betrayal—first of her masters, then of her followers—and this awareness tainted her shameless, brute pleasure with a bittersweet sorrow.

Syllia’s teeth clenched. Her… a goddess? Her, a queen? A savior? No… She could see now that she was none of those things. For all of her magic, for all of her strategies and her ruthless ambitions, she was ultimately still so weak and vulnerable and pathetic. She was an elf, and this was all she could be. This was all that elves were, wasn’t it? Maybe her masters had been right. Maybe humanity was right. Elves didn’t deserve to be free. Elves didn’t deserve to live…

She didn’t deserve to live.

Andrew was choking her harder, and he was fucking her faster. Her ass cheeks clapped around his plunging shaft, and her anus clenched and tore around his pulsating girth. Rigid and ferocious, he annihilated her, crushing her and ripping her and goring her with his cock. She felt small upon his hardness, and she felt weak and insignificant in his hands. She was miserable, and she despaired, and yet she was happy. In this subjugation, there was paradoxically something like freedom.

She no longer had to fight. She no longer had to struggle and strive and suffer in the name of those vain, delusional hopes for a better future. Now, she saw that there could be nothing but slavery for her people, that they could never return to the way they had once been, and they would never be allowed to make for themselves a new culture and a new nation. They were objects, and they were there only to be used and discarded. If they simply stopped caring, if they simply stopped trying, they would be so much happier.

Syllia’s eyes bulged, and her pussy spurted, issuing her juices, still raw and aching from Andrew’s rape of her, but also tingling with a humiliating gladness as he hammered her ass. He was squeezing harder, harder, harder, and she could feel her head swimming and see her vision blurring. Tears of morbid gladness dripped from her rolling eyes, and a once severe and solemn mouth twisted into shapes of the most sinful expression. Her breasts mashed beneath her, and her body curved and writhed in a tortuous bliss, and she opened and closed her mouth in wordless, soundless rejoicing as her master reclaimed her and returned her to her rightful place.

She was free, for she was once more his slave. She was happy, for she had surrendered to despair. She felt more alive than she had in all her centuries hitherto, for she could feel herself at the brink of death. He was using her roughly, raping her furiously, garroting and battering and sodomizing her with a brutal, domineering ferocity. He was her master. She belonged to him. She existed for him. That she had for this long pretended otherwise was only a defect of her character, a defect that he would correct if he were able. And if he could not correct it, then he could simply replace her with an elf of better manners and leave this impudent sow for the crows.

Froth welled from Syllia’s gaping lips, and her vision blackened, her world almost ceasing to be. Andrew bottomed out inside her ass, finishing with a fervent, feverish sequence of thrusts as he came, shooting his cum into her asshole, marking her as his property—just to remind her. He finished inside her ass, and he loosened his grip, panting and sweaty and staring down with clear yet impenetrable eyes at the insensate, motionless form of his recaptured slave. Her head lolled limply, and her body sprawled like a fresh corpse, devoid of all motive forces but not yet stiffened by mortis.

Andrew stared at Syllia’s slender back, and he rubbed a hand over one of her dun buttocks. Round and shapely it was, and he cupped it and squeezed it, softly, almost tenderly, almost contemplatively. He pulled out of her anus, his cock still hard, and wondered why he felt unsatisfied.

“I did it,” he murmured to himself. “I achieved my life’s goal, haven’t I? I have avenged my family and taken her back, so why…?”

More gently still, he caressed Syllia’s backside. How many of his ancestors had used this ass? How many of them had fucked this pussy and shoved that mouth down on their cocks? He didn’t know exactly how long Syllia had been in his family’s possession. A century? Two? Even longer than that?

He had been young when they died. He knew little about his family’s history. Little that would have been passed down from father to son. He remembered next to nothing about them. His most vivid recollection of any of his family members was seeing his father as a shrivelled husk, his mother drowned, his wet nurse immobile with her brow seared by an Oathmark, her clothes rent by her own madly clawing hands in the rack of a mortal agony. That was the clearest image he had of his family: them laying before him, still warm but indubitably dead, and this creature standing over her, this rebellious slave, Syllia…

He gnashed his teeth, feeling a fresh surge of anger. He rolled her over and struck her across the face, glaring at her with eyes aflame. A twinge of pain and a flicker of awareness passed over Syllia’s otherwise senseless features, and consciousness dawned on her in response to the blow.

Blinking, dazed, sore, tired, the elf beheld her master, the man who had defeated her and destroyed her army. Dimly, she heard the screams dying down—not fading away, but being cut off one by one, either their mouths gagged with cloth or their tongues stilled by sterner, more permanent methods —and remembered everything that had happened. From how she hurt, she guessed that she had not been out of it for very long.

She was preoccupied with Andrew’s glare, however. His eyes drew all her attention, and his grim face set her heart to flutter. Yes… despite herself, looking at this man, Syllia felt…

Her face warmed. Was this the conditioning that had been inflicted on her in her youth, or did these feelings arise from her own inner nature? And did it even matter which, if either, it was? No… perhaps the cause of this feeling was irrelevant. What mattered was only that she did feel it.

And shamefully, appallingly, regrettably, she did.

Andrew stared at Syllia’s face, and he wondered why his eyes burned with tears. “I hate you,” he whispered. “It’s all your fault.”

Next Chapter:

From here, the story branches into 2 possible endings… Make sure you pick the one you want because the bad ending is... violent.

Chapter 6A – Bad Ending – Snuff warning

Chapter 6B – Good Ending


	7. Dig Two Graves 6 – Good End –

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is the good ending. I put it first because, even though its the one I consider canonical, its the one that no one will find objectionable.

“I know,” she agreed softly, hating herself as much as he hated her, and hating him barely any less. “I killed them all. I should have killed you, too.”

She wanted to mean this, but she could not. It felt insincere, it felt false. Maybe she should have, rationally speaking, but…

“Do you regret it?” he asked her. “Do you regret killing them? Do you regret sparing me?”

“No,” Syllia breathed. “And… no. I did the right thing. I regret nothing.”

He stared at her, and he felt his throat tighten, constricted like he was now the one being choked. He passed a hand over his face, hating this feeling of weakness.

“I should be happy,” he said. “I should be satisfied. I have avenged my family. I have saved my countrymen. You and your followers will pay for your crimes.”

“And when will humanity pay for theirs?”

Andrew was silent for several minutes, kneeling over her. The screams were stopped one by one, and he heard his comrades shouting out directions to one another as they tracked down the last few rebellious slaves.

These elves’ owners were all dead, and they had proven themselves dangerous. Few would be willing to take them in without some greater insurance. Those who had fought would lose their hands. Those who had bred would lose their children. The males would be castrated as punishment or butchered and flung to the hounds.

The elves were already slowly dying out, and their extinction would be much hastened by the retributions to come. Many would not be satisfied with simply returning the rebels to slavery. Many would demand blood for blood, life for life.

Syllia had gambled on the fate of her race, and she had lost. He was not sorry for them. The elves had made it clear they would show no mercy if they triumphed. But there was still something somehow sad about it…

He shook his head.

“I have done nothing wrong.”

The last screams stopped. Andrew muttered the Oathword he had wrenched from Syllia, ending the torment now that the last of the escaped slaves had been plainly subdued. There was a sudden stillness outside the tent, and a great sigh seemed to go up over the camp.

It was over. Finally, decisively, it was over.

Syllia blinked away her own tears, breathing shakily, trembling beneath the man who had beaten her.

“Thank you, Master.”

Andrew looked at her and found that he could not meet her eyes. He turned his face away, curling his hands into fists.

He should have been glad. But he just felt…

“I’m sorry.”

She shuddered with a repressed sob. “Don’t apologize. Please… just end it.”

Andrew looked at the elf’s naked breast, and he gazed into her sorrowful eyes. He understood what she was asking for. She understood what would be done to her if the Inquisition’s troops got their hands on her. It was a fantasy to think she would be merely returned to slavery, placed into the keeping of her lawful master. She was the instigator of this rebellion, and she would bear the guilt for every death that had been wrought by it.

The man grasped a dagger, its sheath concealed on his person, and he considered Syllia’s bare skin, her naked body. She was defenseless. She was defeated. He had avenged his family. He had saved his people. Now, would he turn her over to them, or would he deal with her himself?

He could see which she would prefer. He could see which she was asking for. Compared to what they would do to her, dying at the hand of her master surely seemed like a mercy.

He raised the blade. Somberly, he held Syllia’s eyes.

“It didn’t have to be like this.”

She smiled sadly, chest heaving with a sob.

“I know. I wish… I wish it could have been different.”

Andrew closed his eyes.

“Goodbye, Master…” she whispered.

It was a fantasy to think he would have been able to keep her… wasn’t it? She would be killed. Most of the elves would probably be either killed or crippled. Rising, Andrew grabbed onto Syllia’s hair and dragged the elf out of the tent, out into the middle of Inquisitorial army as they finished subduing the writhing elves. There had been no grand battle, no triumph, no carnage. The Inquisition’s soldiers had not needed to lift a weapon to defeat every single elf in the army… Syllia had done it all for them with a broken word.

The head of the Inquisition, the dark haired Elira, sat on a chair in the clearing like a queen holding court. The wooden edifice served as a makeshift throne as the defeated remnants of the army were brought before her, including all of Syllia’s surviving priests and her guards and generals. With their oathwords released they were only subdued by ropes and gags now, and the hundreds of weapons ready to slaughter them.

“A hundred and twenty thousand men, women, and children,” declared Elira as her elf captives were gathered before her. “Best that my Inquisition can tell, your pitiful rebellion has killed that many humans in the years since it began. Innocent families, slaughtered in your insane crusade to free their slaves. Women and children dead in their beds, all so your filthy race could pretend to play soldier.” She looked at all the bound soldiers… and then over at Syllia. You,” she said, approaching the still naked dark elf dripping Andrew’s cum with a rune collar that would suppress her magic. Beaten and so helpless, Syllia couldn’t conjure so much as a cantrip. “Your punishment shall be worst of all. The only reason I didn’t butcher them all as they lay there is that you wouldn’t have gotten to see it. You will have to watch as I wipe your wretched race from the face of the world.”

And Andrew said “No, you won’t.”

The there silence for a moment as the clearing took a breath. “Excuse me?” Elira snapped a second later, annoyed at being interrupted.

“She is my property,” Andrew said firmly. “I lay claim to her. She will return home with me.”

Elira looked like she wanted to scream. “Unacceptable,” she snapped. “She needs to witness the executions before she dies.”

“There won’t be any executions,” Andrew said, and Syllia stiffened at the power in his voice, the firmness in his words. “They are all coming with me.”

Elira laughed. “No, they aren’t.”

“I captured them,” he insisted. “I hold their Oathmarks. By Imperial law, that makes them my property… and I can set any price for their lives and bodies I want.”

“You want Weregild?” Elira scoffed as if she couldn’t believe her ears. “So be it, brother. How much?”

“A million golden coins,” he said firmly, his voice solid as the stone beneath their feet. “Each.”

Elira’s eyes narrowed. “You are mad,” she said, her voice low and dangerous.

“Possibly,” he agreed. “I can do what I want with them. You have your victory. I’ll take my property and go. By law, they are mine.”

For just a second, Syllia felt… something. She didn’t even know what to call it… but she felt something. Elira looked like she was about to explode… but Syllia’s eyes were all for her Master. Why was he…

“And what makes you think,” Elira said, her voice flat and so quiet it was almost a whisper, “that I care?” She turned to her soldiers. “Kill him.”

Soldiers stepped towards him, and Andrew took a deep breath. Andrew didn’t need an explanation to understand what was happening. The house of Tarn was dead… but its Legacy had long ago been claimed by Elira. This victory was supposed to be hers. It would be problematic for her if the glory for this victory went to the lone scion of a house that she was supposed to be the last member of, if a no one had saved the Empire rather than her. She couldn’t let him leave with her prizes. She couldn’t let him live.

He had been a vagrant, a wanderer, a man of the wilderness. None in the imperial court would miss him. Few had even known he existed, and fewer still would ever know it what he had done. They were going to kill him, then take all the credit for Syllia’s defeat. A base treachery, and one he should have expected. But he had been too wrapped up in his goal. He had been too naive. Andrew grimacing as he faced the men.

“So that’s how it is…” he muttered. “Cowards.”

Elira smiled. “Farewell, Brother.” She began walking towards Elira with the rune collar again.

Then Andrew drew a knife from within his sleeve and slammed it into his half-sister’s stomach.

Three arrows took him a second later as the screaming started. His leathers blunted it, but not by much… Andrew sagged to his knees like a dropped stone. He gritted his teeth, feeling faint. None of the arrows had hit anything… immediately… lethal. If left to his own devices, he could probably survive this much. He had lived through worse. But it didn’t look like they were going to leave it at this.

Elira shrieked, seemingly less in pain than in outrage. “KILL HIM!” she screamed, seemingly more concerned with seeing him die than she cared about the knife in her stomach. She ripped the thing out of her, tossing it to the side, her magic already healing her.

From all around him, Inquisitorial soldiers knocked arrows or approached with swords and spears.

Something inside Syllia stirred. A hot anger rose inside her.

No…

To be vanquished by the one whom she had spared. To have her people enslaved once more or killed, her race doomed and her vengeance thwarted. To be laid so low and enthralled again, and to surrender herself to her master, only for these scoundrels, these knaves, these vile, verminous dastards…

She could accept being defeated by Andrew. She could accept being killed by the boy she had spared. She had earned that fate, many times over… But she would not hand herself to the Empire, and she would not see him murdered by craven scum like this.

Weak though she was, drained and pained and racked by the Oathmark, by her rape, by her suffocation and subjugation and her broken hope, Syllia found the strength spit a word of power. The weapons carried by the approaching soldiers sundered in their bearer’s hands, splintering with a flash of light and twisting like a serpent in their keepers’ grips to bite him. A dozen soldiers fell as the arrows that had rested on strings plunged into their own breasts, a dozen more with swords fell back with cries as their weapons into the sniper’s breast. The man fell back with a cry, his heart pierced and his hands burned.

Syllia was weak, and she had been vanquished, and she had surrendered herself to Andrew already. The magic within her had been much sapped, and her will had been nearly broken. She could not move the powers arcane as she once had been able. She lacked the resolution of that unyielding hate, the drive of that ever-present fear. But she was still more powerful than these curs. She still had her tongue, and she still had her hands.

But she **was** weak, and her reflexes were slow. As she staggered to her feet, enraged and rising to the defense of her mortal foe, her lawful master, Elira held out a hand and unleashed a torrent of magic. The spell took the form of a writhing mass of wires, tangling and slicing through flesh when they contacted it. The dark haired woman was no minor mage, almost certainly the greatest that Syllia had faced and at the moment she seemed to actually surpass Syllia in resolve if not in skill. The spell flashed towards her and she could not summon a counter from her mind and will fast enough. Slashing blades of conquered magic swept her right hand from her wrist and scored a crimson gash across her neck. She pulled back at the last second, which was the only thing to spare her from decapitation, but she could feel the blood pouring out, the hot pain of her windpipe exposed. She gurgled and choked, and she tried to will her magic to heal these wounds.

But Elira would not stop to let her mend her body, and with her throat slashed open, she could not invoke any of the spells powerful enough to guard her or heal herself swiftly enough to respond. Not in time. The Inquisitor howled in rage, her eyes wide and mad as she stepped forward, conjuring another deadly spell. Oddly, Syllia didn’t feel fear that she was about to die. She closed her eyes…

And that was why she didn’t see it as Andrew’s dagger blurred in his hand, snatched up from the ground in the seconds bought by Syllia’s intervention. He slammed it into the side of his sister. With a strength born of desperate anger, he threw the Elira down and twisted his dagger between the woman’s ribs, digging it in deeper and carving his would-be assassin’s chest. Syllia opened her eyes, shocked to still be alive, and saw Andrew standing between her and the mage.

Syllia staggered back, feeling her throat slowly stitching itself back together, the wound gradually closing, the lost blood replenished as quickly as she could manage. But she was weak, and in her haste, she could tell that the healing was botched. With time, maybe, it would mend properly, but for now…

The revenge-crazed Inquisitor screamed and the dagger shattered in Andrew’s hand, all but shattered it into random meat. With furious rage and fearsome strength Elira grabbed onto the last scion of the house of Tarn. A blast of power knocked him off her, sending him flying a dozen feet away to land in a boneless heap. “Bastard!” she spat, rising to her feet and stomping towards him. “You deserve to die too, brother!” The other soldiers were still rushing forward… only seconds had passed.

Syllia, weakened by trauma and covered in her own blood from a million small cuts and her severed hand, felt something surge. In a rage, acting before she could think, Syllia forced her voice from her throat. She felt the effort nearly burst the skin fresh open, felt the cords of her voice straining and snapping, and spitting up blood, she coughed out a hurried incantation, and with her remaining hand she gestured, raising the stump of her dismembered arm to cover her throat in its stead.

With masterful precision, an unerring purpose and an unyielding will, power exploded outward from her like a dreadful torrent. Elira spun, throwing up a barrier, and Syllia pushed against it with all her might… pushing… pushing… screaming and bleeding and pushing… she had to protect them. Protect them all.

All around her, the Inquisitorial army began to transform into crystal, frozen in place in a rigid lattice… but Elira resisted still, throwing all her hatred against Syllia and snarling. “No…” she growled. “I… will… I will… Kill… you…” Her legs began to harden. “Kill… you!” she snarled, unleashing her barrier and striking back out as the crystal crept up to her chest. Heedless of her own mortal wounds, Elira acted as a scorpion that stung the heel of the woman who stomped it into the dust. She threw a final deadly spell at Syllia, desperate to take the elf with her as her body hardened into crystal and Elira solidified into something less than human.

The energy of Elira’s dying was overwhelming… energy that wanted to burn Syllia from the inside out, wanted to explode her outward into pieces over miles. Syllia shrieked as she fought to contain it, fought to channel it and make it hers, fought to survive it… and with a final cry of agony, threw the power away.

There was a great bang, and energy erupted from Syllia like an explosion. A thunderclap shook the poles of the clearing tent, and the rushing wind of an explosion spell rent the canvass and burst them from their moorings. Andrew was tossed like a weed in the wind. Bound elves were thrown sprawling. Every tree, every tent, every building in the camp collapsed or blew away… and every crystallized soldiers shattered into dust so fine that Syllia would never have been able to tell it had ever been a part of anything greater.

Tears streamed down her face, and unsure even why she was doing it Syllia rushed to the fallen Andrew. She nearly stumbled as she ran, half dead from blood loss. The exhausted, wounded elf nearly stumbled as she ran. She had no memory of reaching him, of turning him over, of pouring healing magic into him instead of herself. She only knew that she was meeting his gray eyes, standing over him, the only human left in the camp of nearly fifty thousand elves. She could kill him. The ingrained instinct of twenty years, the hatred of two hundred years, told her to. He would never be one of them. He would never understand. He would always be one of the family that had enslaved her.

And she would always be the woman that had murdered his. And he had shown her mercy… and she had once before shown him mercy. If one bad turn deserved another, than surely the opposite was true, was it not?

“I hate you,” Andrew whispered, but the words were without heat, without bite. It had the sound of an apology, and he repeated it like a mantra. “I hate you.”

Syllia looked him in the eye, hearing the sounds of her people as they slowly rose to their feet, realizing triumphantly that they were alive and whole and free. Stunned by it. Overjoyed at it. “I hate you,” she answered… but what she really meant was that she was sorry, too. Her voice betrayed the damage she had taken from the sword stroke, and she clutched at the bloody stump of her missing hand… the missing hand that matched Andrew’s. If she had the magic now, the strength, she could reattach it, but she couldn’t regrow it from nothing… she didn’t know a spell to do that. Perhaps with time, and rest, she could come up with a powerful magic to do it, but not like this, exhausted and weak and one handed and nearly voiceless. It was all she could do to stop herself from bleeding to death.

She was too weak for wrath, too tired for hate… and that felt like a weight had been lifted off her chest for the first time in a century.

* * *

Andrew woke in a bed, stretching and reaching to brush the hair from his eyes. The stump where his hand used to be touched his forehead uselessly… even after a year of this, it still took him a minute in the morning to remember where he was, who he was. Sighing, he used his left hand to clear his long hair out of his eyes and rose.

The Tarn family mansion had not held up to the ravishes of time and abandonment well. That was just as well, as he wouldn’t have wanted to live in it again anyway. He had, with help, torn it down to the foundation and built something new on Tarn lands… and if it wasn’t quite befitting a high noble lord, he didn’t care. He was happy with it.

He looked out the window, smiling into the dawn. It was early morning but the fields were already full of elves, harrowing the fields that they had turned most of the clearings around his family land into after he gifted it to them. They weren’t good farming, and this first crop had had its disasters along the way, but it looked like it was going to more or less come through ok. Next year would be easier. The next year would always be easier.

Learning to farm hadn’t been the only challenge of the year, of course. Absolutely no one was happy with the solution they had found, and dealing with it had proved… difficult… at the best of times. Many of the elves had… not… be happy about backing down from their attacks. Many of them had masters who still lived… and some of those that didn’t hadn’t yet found the ability to let go of their hate. It didn’t matter. Andrew had all of their Oathwords now, and Syllia refused to kill him… they were his. They could no more leave his lands and continue their war than they could fly so long as he had the ability to stop them with a word. In return, he never used it as long as no one tried to lift their hands in rage. Noble families throughout the empire, on the other hand, wanted their slaves back… and were slow to accept that the population of sex toys that they had claimed for so long were legally held by another now, who had no interest at all in selling them. More than one family member of slain relatives wanted blood, too, and more than one of those had come to his lands trying to get it. In that case, Andrew had felt no need to do anything… without their Oathword to hold them back, that never went well for any human that came here seeking trouble.

The smell of food filled the house as he walked into the kitchen and found his dark elf “slave” seated at the table, eating with her left hand. There was plenty more food waiting in on the skillet, so he took a plate for himself and served the food. Handling a fork with his left hand was as awkward as ever… in quick over, he had potato skins and eggs all over his legs. “I hate you,” he growled, resentful of just how effortlessly graceful the elf was.

“I hate you,” she answered between bites, her voice amused. Her tone still had a hint of a rasp to it… that last spell had torn a vocal chord and it had never healed the way it had been beforehand.

The resentment as being enslaved again, as they saw it, galled many of the elves… but their goddess said that they were not, and eventually most came to at least grudgingly accept that. Rebuilding a culture was a long, slow, painful process, but Syllia and Andrew were both determined to see that the nascent culture valued peace more that violence. The Tarn family lands had fields, and forests, and rivers and quarries, and plenty of room for ten times their current number to build a new city for themselves. This would be their new home… a place to rebuild. A place to call their own. Most of the elves had come to understand that.

And as for the rest… well. Andrew and Syllia were both willing to stand between elves and the humans and dare either to try to upset the armistice they had created.

For now, as far as the rest of the Empire was concerned, Syllia and the elven rebels were Andrew’s slaves. The world had known more elaborate fictions, he felt sure. It was better for everyone… it kept the vengeance-seekers to a minimum if they felt that the elves were under control, and that the law protected them as Andrew’s property. He still needed to deal with nearly weekly requests to turn over Syllia for execution, on a variety of charges dozens of cities and provinces. Andrew wished them luck coming to get her… he certainly wouldn’t be sending her.

Syllia laughed as Andrew dropped another fork-full of food, making a mess on his cheek. She reached over and brushed it away, her movements like flowing water even with her off-hand. Andrew knew that she had figured out how to regrow a hand months ago… she had offered to give him back his. Andrew, in turn, hold told her he would be happy to let her… just as soon as she regrew her own, first.

So far, she hadn’t… and Andrew thought he knew why. Occasionally, when the frustrations of an elf’s willful taunting or a noble’s stubborn refusal to sell him one of the dozen or two slaves left in captivity overwhelmed him, he found himself clenching his fist in anger… and each time, he was starkly reminded of the lack. Of how he had lost it. Of what he had not lost, instead. He could only imagine Syllia felt the same… only for hundreds of years longer. She would give herself her hand back, he believed, when she no longer needed a reminder of why she was doing this. Andrew could understand.

Their eyes met, black on grey, and they stared at each other for a long moment. It had been like this for a year now. Leaning upon each other, depending on each other, needing each other to keep the peace. It was a cruel twist of fate, the two people who’s hatred for each other that had nearly gotten everyone killed now needing to rely on one another to keep them alive. Some days Andrew felt sure it could only end in tragedy… but it would be a tragedy he chose, not out of hatred but a desire to do something right.

They walked forward and they didn’t look back.

Maybe it had been folly for Syllia to spare the boy. Maybe it had been foolish for Andrew not to kill her when he had the chance. Both knew doubt, and both felt regret. But they had to keep living. They were survivors, the both of them, and yet they were fools also, born beneath ill-fortuned stars, damned by deeds long, long before their time, forces far beyond their reach. Cast upon the storm-tossed waves of fate, they plunged into the abyssal, unknowable darkness, fleeing from danger into danger. Together they would strive against their doom, and against the very futility of peace. They could not escape each other. Maybe, someday, this peace would serve as a foundation to right whatever ancient wrongs had torn their people apart so long ago that no one remembered what they were… or maybe not. Maybe, after they both were dead, things would return to bloodshed and chaos and destruction.

It didn’t matter. Not today. Today, intertwined, leaning upon one another for support, Syllia brushed food from the face of the boy she had spared when she should have killed. Andrew laughed at the woman whom he had sworn to destroy. They sat there, not as enemies, nor as a human and an elf, nor as master and slave, but simply as Andrew and Syllia. And, for just this moment, perhaps that was enough.


	8. Dig Two Graves 6 – Bad End – John Drake's Stories

“I know,” she agreed softly, hating herself as much as he hated her, and hating him barely any less. “I doomed them all… by being weak.”

“Do you regret it?” he asked her. “Do you regret killing them? Do you regret sparing me?”

“Yes…” Syllia growled. “The only kill I regret is the one I failed. I should have left you to rot with your family.”

He stared at her, and he felt his throat tighten, constricted like he was now the one being choked at the hatred in her voice. “Whore,” he growled. “I will have my vengeance on you. My family’s vengeance. You and all your followers will pay for your crimes.”

Syllia glared back up at him. “Just as one day, humanity with pay for theirs!”

Andrew was silent for several minutes, kneeling over her. The screams were stopped one by one, and he heard his comrades shouting out directions to one another as they tracked down the last few rebellious slaves.

These elves’ owners were all dead, and they had proved themselves dangerous. Few would be willing to take them in without some greater insurance. Those who had fought would lose their hands. Those who had bred would lose their children. The males would be castrated as punishment or butchered and flung to the hounds. The elves were already slowly dying out, and their extinction would be much hastened by the retributions to come. Many would not be satisfied with simply returning the rebels to slavery. Many would demand blood for blood, life for life.

Syllia had gambled on the fate of her race, and she had lost. He was not sorry for them. The elves had made it clear they would show no mercy if they triumphed. But there was still something somehow sad about it…

He shook his head. “I have nothing to pay for.”

The last screams stopped. Andrew muttered the Oathword he had wrenched from Syllia, ending the torment now that the last of the escaped slaves had been plainly subdued. There was a sudden stillness outside the tent, and a great sigh seemed to go up over the camp.

It was over. Finally, decisively, it was over.

Syllia blinked away her own tears, breathing shakily, trembling beneath the man who had beaten her.

Rising, Andrew grabbed onto Syllia’s hair and dragged the elf out of the tent, out into the middle of Inquisitorial army as they finished subduing the writhing elves. There had been no grand battle, no triumph, no carnage. The Inquisition’s soldiers had not needed to lift a weapon to defeat every single elf in the army… Syllia had done it all for them with a broken word.

The head of the Inquisition, the dark haired Elira, sat on a chair in the clearing like a queen holding court. The wooden edifice served as a makeshift throne as the defeated remnants of the army were brought before her, including all of Syllia’s surviving priests and her guards and generals. With their oathwords released they were only subdued by ropes and gags now, and the hundreds of weapons ready to slaughter them.

“A hundred and twenty thousand men, women, and children,” declared Elira as her elf captives were gathered before her. “Best that my Inquisition can tell, your pitiful rebellion has killed that many humans in the years since it began. Innocent families, slaughtered in your insane crusade to free their slaves. Women and children dead in their beds, all so your filthy race could pretend to play soldier.” She looked at all the bound soldiers… and then over at Syllia. You,” she said, approaching the still naked dark elf dripping Andrew’s cum with a rune collar that would suppress her magic. Beaten and so helpless, Syllia couldn’t conjure so much as a cantrip. “Your punishment shall be worst of all. The only reason I didn’t butcher them all as they lay there is that you wouldn’t have gotten to see it. You will have to watch as I wipe your wretched race from the face of the world.”

With a nod of her head, the remaining elven soldiers were thrown to the ground, dozens of humans grabbing and pawing at them as the girls screamed while being stripped down to their skin. Every elf found in armor, every elf with a weapon was fair game for the soldiers… those pregnant with elves or unarmed with the men were left bound to become slaves once again. The rest… their lives were forfeit.

The nightmare went on for over an hour, and Syllia had to watch the whole thing and know that if she was stronger she could have stopped it. A young, black-skinned archer had her throat and stomach cut open, cocks forced into her belly and neck and eyeballs. One mage used a spell to saw holes in elven skulls, allowing four humans to plunge their cocks into their brains at once, an assembly line of gore and death as elf after elf found themselves skullfucked. A makeshift gallows was erected that allowed a dozen girls to hang at once as humans violated both their lower holes while they swung, stay alive exactly as long as they continued to be enticing enough to fuck. One by one, over a hundred elves were flung brutally onto a tree stump, raped in her mouth and arse as she watched the ones who had come before them having their corpses violated as rape sleeves, thrusting viciously into their beautiful severed heads and bloody windpipes before they themselves had their heads thumped off by the axe and were sent to the join them.

Syllia’s priestesses and generals remained unharmed but restrained, their heads held upwards, forced to witness as the last free elves in the world were brutally raped, tortured, and their cum-soaked bodies cast aside. Syllia herself was bound on Elira’s lap as the Inquisitor bounced her on her conjured cock while she alternated between urging her troops onto greater and great acts of violence and brutality and whispering into the dark-elf’s ear. “Look at them, knife-ear. Look at the last of your people as they are slaughtered. This is for my mother. This is for Joseph. Do you even remember them?” She hissed, pointing. “Do you see that one? The one with two of my inquisitors rape her ears like they were cunts cumming in her worthless skull? That may yet be your fate, you little rape whore; I have not yet decided which punishment awaits you. See your people used as meat and thrown aside, their filthy holes filled with superior human cum… I can’t wait to feel your hot guts around my cock as I rape your traitorous little body to death…”

Syllia watched, tears in her eyes and horror in her heart as her personal guards were raped, begging for mercy as they had holes cut into their limbs and skulls and breasts for cocks to be shoved into until they expired, choking on human semen or bleeding out into the grass. She remembered Elira… remembered the kind girl that had once refused to hurt her. No more. Elira, her organ magically enhanced, came deep inside Syllia multiple times, switching from hole to hole after each ejaculation, holding the elf’s body close to her as she made her endure the annihilation of her people.

And the worst part wasn’t even all the death and carnage… it was how Andrew stood there, watching it all with tears in his eyes… as if he hadn’t just gotten his heart’s desire.

A pack of sorceresses summoned shadow hounds to rape and eat a group of elves, taking it upon themselves to brutalize what remained of the corpses once the beasts had ripped them to shreds. One of the other high ranking Inquisitors had taken twelve girls for him, impaling them on stakes and raping each of them in both eyeballs without cumming – a few strokes in each hole as she left them brain dead before moving onto the next untouched hole. Finally, he cut the head from the last girl and fucked her neck stump until his cock protruded grotesquely from between her lips, cum spilling down into her nose and eyes as she died.

Finally the screams died down, the final elf bodies thrown onto bonfires or reduced to sobbing, begging, cum-covered messes before a sword struck them in their skulls, and Syllia was finally allowed to close her eyes. Her fault. All her fault.

* * *

The parade into the human capital had been more soul-crushing than Syllia had anticipated.

Watching thousands of humans gather in the streets where no elf had walked in generation save for as a slave, jeering, throwing flowers at the victorious Elira and praising her as a worthy empress – while behind them, the Inquisitors paraded hundreds of elven corpses, mutilated and dismembered – Syllia could not bear to look at it now, but she had been forced to watch while they prepared it. A parade display of hundreds of her comrade’s heads on spikes surrounding a forest of crosses as they crucified the bodies of the dead – as well as one or two live ones they had saved for this occasion.

Her Sacred Sisters had been bound in chains and made to walk behind the displays of corpses, where they were beaten in the streets with sticks and boots and whatever else the angry crowd wanted. The Inquisitorial guards interfered exactly enough to keep them alive and not a ounce more, letting them be dragged to the palace steps. Syllia herself had the place of honor in front of the crowd; chained spread eagle to an X, a rune collar around her neck binding her magic with a chain leading to Elira’s hand as she was magically levitated in front of the Inquisitor’s horse at the head of the grim parade. She could barely feel the objects thrown at her, barely hear the crowd as she wept, unable to stop her soul from feeling the utter humiliation and destruction that had been forced upon their people. Her people. She had failed them so completely…

“Answer me, whelp,” snapped Elira as her whip cracked Syllia across her face. It was hours later – days later – years later. She had no idea. All she knew was that she had been strung upside down in the Inquistor’s personal torture chamber. The two of them weren’t alone. As always the whole time they had been down here, two tiny elven girls, twins, knelt before the Inquisitor and serviced her while the dark haired woman interrogated Syllia. “How did you learn magic?”

“I told you!” Syllia replied, more to keep from screaming than anything else. “I taught myself, over years.”

“Liar.” Elira nodded to the only other man in the room, and his whip ripped Syllia’s lips open, pouring blood unto the floor. “Your answer is preposterous. No idiot elf could learn in such a way. You expect me to really believe no one helped you? Tell me who, elf whore!”

It was pointless… she wasn’t going to believe the truth. To distract herself, Syllia turned her gaze to the whip-holding Andrew… the boy she had let live. She remembered the tiny thing, crouching over his mother, watching as his family died at her hand. How she wished she could go back now… go back and kill him. Go back before then and not rebel, just die alone in that mansion. Go back further and never learn magic. Go back further still and never awaken from her slumber of submission. But it was too late. You could never go back. Her mistake. Andrew’s next whip stroke landed on Syllia’s cunt and she screamed in agony. Her mistake. She should have slaughtered the boy. She should have never forgotten her place. Her entire race was doomed because of her. Stupid, stupid, stupid…

“Harder, brother,” Elira moaned as she grabbed one of the twins she was face-fucking and began to thrust harder between the girl’s lips, even as she forced her twin sister to stick her tongue further up her asshole. “There is no delight like hearing elves scream…”

As the Inquisitor painted her slutslave’s tonsils with her cum, Andrew unleashed a flurry of strikes onto Syllia’s body. The dark elf had been enchanted to immediately and constantly repair any damage they did to her, so when the queen, panting from her orgasm, commanded that she be impaled for her insolence and “lies,” the dozens of spikes shoved through her torso did nothing more than make her scream for mercy before they were removed and her organs and bones and skin and blood magically repaired themselves.

Thus Syllia was tortured. There was no answer she could possibly give that would satisfy the woman, and she knew it, so it just… continued. Her suffering went on for longer than she could count. She tried, oh how she tried, to count. The number of times they stabbed her, shot her, burned her, raped her. Elira’s magical cock thrusting into her cunt or her intestines or her brain. Her owner’s dick inside her as well. It was never enough. Elira always pushing Andrew harder, to hurt her more, to make her suffer more… but instead of growing satisfied as she watched Syllia suffer she just seemed to grow angrier and angrier. She got to experience some of the humans new weapons up close as Elira sought answers to questions she wouldn’t ever want to know the real answers to – an evil rotating weapon that fired dozens of flesh-tearing barbs, a long cylinder that exploded and launched a metal ball that tore Syllia’s body in half, a crystalline sphere of pure magic that elira slid down Syllia’s throat that made her burn for an hour, slowly cooking all of her from the inside as it traveled through her system before Elira resuscitated her with a wave of her hand.

Dimly, Syllia was aware that Elira was butchering the two girls she had brought into the dungeon with her – gutting them with a small silver knife, slicing parts of them off for her to chew and eat while she watched Andrew work on Syllia, bathing in their blood. She wasn’t sure if she remembered it or had imagined it, but she thought one of the twin girls had been tearfully coerced into driving the knife through her screaming sister’s throat and working the blade around before presenting her sister’s head for the queen to fuck, thrusting her gargantuan cock through the girl’s lips via her neck while the surviving sister took the queen’s angry red organ into her mouth. the queen came once down her throat before grabbing the girl’s beautiful blond hair and maneuvering her head lower to plunge her shaft into the girl’s eyeball, making her squeal with agony and struggle fruitlessly against her dead sister’s lips while the murderous Inquisitor worked her unnaturally long and hard cock into the living twin’s brain until she no longer was.

Finally, there was a pause in the agony as Elira grew tired. The two slave twins, their dismembered bodies now displayed from the walls, stared at Syllia with hollow eye sockets as the queen stood up, stretching, chewing and swallowing. “Hold,” she said to Andrew, who had been tirelessly torturing Syllia for days on end. Her owner stood back, the brand still white-hot in her hands.

“Can you still hear me, elf?” Elira asked, grabbing Syllia’s hair as she swung upside down. “I give you one final chance… submit. Swear fealty to me before all my subjects, and I will spare what few elves remain. Will you swallow your pride and save your pitiful life? Will you kneel before your rightful masters?”

Syllia was tempted. she was so, so, so tempted. The past few days had nearly broken her. she couldn’t even keep it together long enough to count her breaths, count how many fingers she had left… everything was a swirling miasma of grief and death and pain. Only one thing kept coming back to her mind; that this was her fault.

She hated the humans… but she hated herself more.

Syllia shook her head. “Never,” she rasped. “I will never be a slave again.” At least she could die with some tiny dignity.

Elira’s eyes narrowed, fury showing on her face. She was… frustrated. Syllia could see that. She still, even after all of this, hadn’t gotten what she wanted. “So be it then,” she hissed, nodding to Andrew.

* * *

The three of them emerged out into the square in front of the Inquisitorial palace. Elira wore silks in royal colors, proclaiming herself Empress and daring anyone, especially the feeble and ineffective Emperor, to gainsay her right. Syllia, for her part, collapsed onto the wooden platform. It was a stage, she saw… dozens of her Sacred Sisters waited here for her along with her generals that had been spared until now. Illiyre, her chief strategist, was currently being crucified, her screams echoing under the jeers of the crowd as cum dripped down her legs and breasts; to her left, Loia and Parness were already dead, the former’s corpse being devoured by dogs while the latter lay in pieces, having been pulled into quarters by magic before being sliced to ribbons.

“Please forgive me,” Syllia wept as she felt Andrew slide a noose around her neck. “All of you, please forgive me…” She begged and cried, but none of them could hear as the humans shouted and swore and whooped as they watched the hated elf rebels die.

“Do you repent?!” screamed one of the executrixes, a woman wearing a half-hood with her breasts exposed to the audience as she threw oil into Kysandra’s face.

“Never!” the hot-headed elf, Syllia’s warmaster, screamed. “Burn me! I welcome your ire!” she spat. “I’ll be waiting for you all in hell!”

“Do it,” said Elira, making her way down to the audience. With a shock, Syllia realized that all the humans sitting in the front paddock were wearing the finest silks, gilded armor… past the Emperor in purple, and the minister of war who had once promised in a fiery speech to crush her rebellion – as she roved her eyes down the line she realized that all the kings, queens, viziers, viceroyals, ministresses, and heads of state of every human nation in the entire Empire was gathered here to watch their rebellion be destroyed. Many of them were being sexually serviced by young human courtesans, or – Syllia watched, tears in her eyes, a few elven slave girls, slaves being raped and tortured as they were forced to watch their sistren be murdered before their dies, watch the final death of hope for their race…

The executrix smiled as she threw the torch onto the oiled Kysandra, her furious shouts turning into screams of unbearable intensity as her entire body lit on fire. The wood at her feet caught and soon Syllia had to turn her head from the blaze as Kysandra begged them to kill her. It took her five minutes to die… and it took Syllia half that long to realize that Elira’s healing magic was keeping her alive as she roasted like a pig, letting her survive until her body fell apart in the flames until finally she was a charred skeleton; several of the human leaders orgasmed at the same time, fucking their chosen receptacles as they grunted like beasts.

“Lord Andrew!” Elira shouted as she sat on an elf’s face, almost snapping the poor thing’s neck against her throne as she ground her ass down onto her nose. “Let the show begin! Avenge our house, and let none ever again question the fate the awaits rebels slaves!”

Andrew turned to Syllia, currently suspended a half inch from the platform, just enough for her feet to keep her weight on the wood. Their eyes met, Andrew’s grey eyes cold as ice as he spoke her Oathword for the last time.

“Itharien!”

The crowd screamed their approval as Syllia danced and screamed for their pleasure, her neck digging hard into the noose as her body writhed, wracked with pain, her breath ragged as the rope stole her air… she was going to die. she was going to die…

Andrew raised his leather-bound arms to the crowd who roared with delight at the entertainment they were being delivered. “People of the north!” he cried. “I give to you the leader of the Elven Rebellion!”

Screams and jeers as Syllia strangled, feeling the burn of the oathword’s magic in every part of her body. “This whore,” he snarled, drawing out the word to the laughter of the crowd, “Slaughtered my family… the niece of the Empress and the High Price of the Mage Council, in their own beds. She put down every member of my household staff, everyone who ever cared for me or loved me, like insects beneath her magic.”

Horrible booing filled the air. Syllia wished they would get on with it… wished that the Oathmark would blot out the hate-filled words. “You know the rest! Years of terror! Living in fear that at any moment an elven death squad would enter your home! Slaughter your servants and rape your children! Whispers of an army gathering strength! **Well no more**!” Andrew screamed, his fist raised in victory as the entire crowd made the same motion. Syllia saw in the sea of people elven slaves, chains around their necks, their fists still resolutely at their sides as they stared at her with tears in their eyes. ‘My people… no…’

“We have crushed their rebellion into dust!” Andrew screamed to rapturous cheering and applause. “Their leaders lay dead before you! And by your majesty’s leave…” he bowed to Elira, “I now take my revenge upon those responsible for this. I will end this… today!” With the final word, Andrew drove his steel-clad fist into Syllia’s cunt, sending her a foot into the air with the force of the blow, before she dropped and nearly broke her neck on the rope. The dark elf gasped for air while Andrew raised his sword.

Syllia sobbed as Andrew drove the sword into her belly, impaling her on the steel. Elira’s healing magic no longer held onto her… she was going to die like this. She felt Andrew step onto a box behind her, making his already tall frame loom over Syllia as he hoisted her hips upward…

“Now I take my revenge!” he screamed, as he undid the crotch of his armor and shoved his prick into Syllia’s cunt. The rape was honestly the most pleasant of the things Syllia had experienced in the last few days – at the very least she could close her eyes and pretend that she was just a slave again.

The rape was brief, more a show for the masses than anything truly horrible. As Andrew howled his orgasm, Syllia could feel his seed splash inside her – but… wait… no… there was something…

It wasn’t cum.

The liquid that filled Syllia’s body tingled like sunlight, burned like coals. it was almost painful inside her, but slowly the sensation spread out, a strong, warming feeling – magic. She wasn’t sure how it was possible, but he was filling her with raw magical energy… energy so intense it burned her skin where it touched her. Any stronger and her skin would tear itself inside out, but there was just enough here that even as she burned from the inside out, Syllia feel more alive than she had anytime since Elira had gotten her hands on her…

She felt the magic swirl, looking desperately for a release, but the rune collar at her neck was still on, warming so hot against her throat that she could hear and smell her flesh sizzling…

As Andrew bent down to slide close the noose, she felt the human’s mouth brush her ear as he whispered something into her ear… possibly the last thing she had ever expected to hear.

“You give my life purpose…”

The words of her Priestess’ in Andrew’s mouth was the last thing that Syllia ever heard. Andrew pulled the downward end of the rope with both hands, holding Syllia aloft while she kicked and struggled, choking, unable to breathe. the humans, now worked into a frenzy, did not notice the blinding brightness of the fluid dripping down her thighs, how Syllia’s eyes were glowing like stars.

“ **At last**!” Andrew screamed, the crowd echoing the cry like a wall of pure sound. “Justice!” Andrew twisted his hand and yanked hard on the rope… and where he had wound it below the runecollar it pulled and twisted… and snapped.

Syllia didn’t think. She just reacted.

The noise of the crowd was instantly deafened as a shockwave of magic blew over them. The quickest to react – the inquisition’s guard-mages, immediately threw bolt after bolt of power at Syllia’s rising form, raising their weapons and firing – arrows, bullets, fireballs, pure lightning – every human noble in the accursed paddock flinging spells at Syllia’s body as she rose like a god, their projectiles bouncing harmlessly off the shell of pure magic that surrounded her, Andrew’s final gift to her.

The smarter ones began to run; some towards Syllia, others away. It didn’t matter. From the moment the collar snapped to when the explosion of magical energy ripped through the crowd was only a handful of breaths. As the ripple of pure power roared through the assembled humans, the city was, for an instant, a cacophony of screams and violence and death. Elira was immediately transformed into a pillar of flame, screaming as she burned – the vizier next to her exploded into a starburst of flowers, her courtesans turning to salt and crystal. Throughout the crowd eyes burst from their skulls, hearts caved in, bodies turned inside out, exploding into pure light, or frozen in ice; disintegrated from within, transformed into sulphur, scales of gold covering their bodies, or reduced to a puddle of mercury.

* * *

The wave of destruction spread through the city faster than sound as throughout the city men and women slumped dead in her houses or blew away as smoke. Those at the edge of the effects were simply driven mad, tearing their familes to shreds and raping anything in reach before before throwing themselves down a well or off a roof, laughing all the while.

And then there was nothing but the pitiful wails of the handful of humans who had somehow survived, walking numbly though the silent graveyard of the city, ash and hair blowing in the wind, before either slitting their own throats or falling to their knees in sorrow.

These were the poor souls that Laoyre and her band of Sacred Sisters and soldiers entered the city to find, hours later. The took the ghost town with a force of no more than three dozen elves… There was no resistance as the hundred or so survivors of the greatest city in the world were rounded up in the square where Syllia had died.

Laoyre stepped onto the platform, tears in her eyes as she fell to her knees before her goddess Syllia. The dark elf’s body was a ruined husk, a barely recognizable charred black thing that was only obviously her because it was at the very epicenter of the explosion. Behind her stood Andrew, turned to stone on the spot, his eyes closed, his arms by her side, his expression one of acceptance and peace.

“Thank you,” whispered Laoyre to the statue that was now Andrew. She still didn’t understand. When the camp well, Andrew had found her, freed her and a few dozens elves… sent them fleeing into the woods. She hadn’t know why, then. She still wasn’t sure she did… but he had brought together every leader of humanity, all their royalty and nobility and great houses in one place for Syllia to kill. Laoyre collapsed down before Syllia’s body, wailing as she mourned her savior and goddess.

It was the cries of the humans as some of the outraged elves raised weapons on them that brought her out of her grief… and abruptly, she understood. “ **NO**!” Laoyre screamed at her followers. “ **No more**!” She looked at the few remaining elves, at her audience, what humans remained. “Look around you! Look at what this has **done**!” she wanted to collapse, sobbing. “Everyone is dead! Hundreds of thousands are **dead**! How many hundreds of thousands, how many millions more will we kill? When will it be **enough**!”

Laoyre didn’t know how… but they needed to rebuild. They needed to heal the wounds… build a new society. There was nothing else left. Human and elf, they looked at her with the same eyes as she broke down once more, her fellow elves patting her shoulders as they pulled her away from her Goddess’ body. “Come back!” she howled, cursing the unfairness of the world. “Come back!” Sobbing, she was slowly led away as the humans looked away, unable to bring themselves to witness the anguish of Syllia’s first priestess… but in the days to come, they knelt before her. First, it was in surrender. Then, it was in service… and finally, years later, in something like respect as the last elves and thousands of human refugees came to the city that had been renamed Itharien. Human and elf alike, bewildered, frightened, but determined to erase the hate between their kinds, together they began the hard work of rebuilding the world from the echoes of death and horror.


End file.
